padren

First of all, there is no single religious definition of Marriage - there are priests who have performed religious same sex marriages. They consider the word religious while not ascribing to the more restrictive definition. The problem of course, is even if same sex marriage is supported by a church and performs one, that marriage fails to provide the same benefits at the state level that other religious marriages provide such as hospital visiting rights. The reason is not the church, but because the state discriminates in preference to one narrow religious definition. No church would be "forced" to perform a same sex marriage anymore than they can be "forced" to accept women to their priesthood. But if priests had certain legal benefits granted by the state, would we at the state level refuse those benefits to churches that allowed women to become priests, simply because some churches (granted, a majority) felt it ran against their definition of a priest as a man of God?

Does anyone know of a good network analyzer for windows? I find when I hit a bottleneck either in downloading/uploading I tend to use some pretty rudimentary techniques for trying to figure out the source - cap something else and see if it boots the speed of the problem connection by a comparable amount. This is pretty ineffective, and I also would really like to know what the through-put is on the various apps I have running on my computer. I use the free ZoneAlarm for my firewall which at least sort of knows what's accessing the net, but I'd really like something more robust. Anyone have any suggestions?

I really liked the movie, I had never known anything about The Watchmen and the story, so it was only when a friend recommended it I thought "okay, I'll see another super-hero movie" and was quite happily impressed by the unique story. The last stories that impressed me for their unique approach would have to be Firefly and the new BSG. One thing I'll say is while watching it I couldn't help but to think that I was only seeing the story after it went through the "Hollywood treatment" which really made me wonder about the nuance I may be missing from the original, but I was still impressed. The moral dilemma was genuinely thought provoking and I considered starting a thread about it here and I'd post in the one you started but that whole section is now defunct. [hide] I may be a bit of a blind idealist when it comes to humanity's potential, but I can't help feeling that if I think it takes a lie to save humanity, that the fault is in my perceptions, not humanity. If I was in the position to share a truth that radically changed humanity's course, I could live with that because of how I feel about the truth, but to share a lie that had an equally radical impact seems manipulative beyond my right to meddle in people's lives. Maybe my conclusions that would motivate such a lie could be right - but they could also be wrong, and it would serve nothing but my subjective conclusions. The truth on the other hand, seems somewhat larger than myself, humanity or my subjective conclusions. I can't help but to feel my thoughts on this topic are somewhat "unrefined" and may be naive so it's a topic I'd like to discuss. As it stands right now though, I can't help but to think Rorschach was right to not compromise. [/hide]

Here's a few that could be fun - you know you're in a depression when: * When hobos stand around empty barrels because they can't afford the lighter fluid. * People hold out their iPhones and make fart noises with their mouths, because they can't afford the iFart Application. * When "Who wants to be a Thousandaire" becomes the #1 hit TV show in America. * When you have 6 degrees in the direction of your creditors and debtors all saying "I have it coming in, I'll pay you as soon as it does" (Sadly I think I may be here...) * When your neighborhood starts marking the houses not for sale to save on signs (from Colbert or Stewart, forget which) * When Jeff Foxworthy rebrands his entire routine as "You may be a Wall Street Fat Cat if..." jokes. * When the only shares going up in the stock market are for that company that manufactures red ink. * When your coin collection would be worth more melted down. ...add em if you got em.

Where is all this pressure coming from? I am not really familiar Congresswoman Waters seriously what is the likelihood Michael Moore having anything more than near-zero influence on anything? I've kind of thought of Moore as a less influential Rush, but if there are genuine sources of real pressure influencing the Bill in a manner that pushes $350,000 homes towards being a "right" I am definitely interested in seeing them.

On what are these assertions based? It seems to be the "prevention" angle is more to stop those who have already committed terrorist acts from continuing to do so. Not just individuals but organizations. Sure, we do send some money on generalized prevention such as increased security checks but I don't think we are running around the world trying to read people's minds to determine if they may ever consider committing a terrorist act. You may be right about Gitmo and I've never been a proponent of that whole deal, but it is only one aspect of the war on terror. If anyone was just in the wrong place at the wrong time then yes "sometimes" that has been the case. As for no "solid leads" we are still pursuing members of known terrorist organizations that have committed and are committed to continuing terrorist attacks. I think the whole "war on terror" can be summed up by the reality that technology now allows loose organizations to launch attacks with resulting death tolls only previously conceivable by other nation states, and as they have no nation of clear origin it makes the deterrent of retribution highly ineffective. We are simply in the process of refining the best way to deal with this new threat and naturally we are making some mistakes along the way as it's a process of trial and error, but the threat is genuine and will only continue to grow over time. I don't agree with all the tactics we've explored, but I certainly don't want to start trying out strategies only after it's gotten too large to ignore.

A little different, but very interesting: http://armorgames.com/play/3260/magic-pen-2 btw, when you get to the level with "the square block to push" it's good to know you can build squares and add hinges to them - I didn't realize that and had to use 71 odd wedges and a lot of gravity!

Just an update, I did find this: http://www.xmlvm.org/iphone/ Looks like an interesting way to develop iphone apps without working on a Mac, but I haven't tried it out yet. When I get the chance I'll comment on how it goes.

and Of course we move it over to "cold case" if we get no information on a crime for an extended period of time and have no effective means to gain new information, but that's not what I am talking about. If a murder is 30 years old and the trail completely cold, a new lead will result in new resources being dispatched to follow it up - regardless of how much money was spent in the past without yielding a result. This is one of the reasons I have trouble seeing terrorism as a "risk to budget" issue - how can you ignore a solid lead on someone that killed thousands of people and has sworn to do it again?

It was basically already said, but they aren't comparing the $6000 drop to the height of the bubble, therefore they are not trying to prevent the bubble from collapsing - it already did. They want to lessen the degree to which values drop below norm during this market correction. When prices stabilize at the "natural" level they'll probably be higher than they are now without any bubble at all. Part of an unmanaged market correction is the overvalue drops to a huge undervalue, then yo-yos towards an equilibrium. The goal is to ease the undervalue drop, as it just adds to the damage during the correction.

This looks like quite an innovative new nuclear reactor: http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22114/page1/ Apparently it needs very little U-235 and runs mostly on U-238. I don't keep up on nuclear physics very much so I am going with the information in the article to a large degree, but it sounds very promising. Does anyone know more about this technique? (also, if this post would be better elsewhere, please feel free to move)

I want to make a comment on that, because it's pretty open ended: If you consider the Iraq war a war solely on Terror, and view it as "not helping" then yes, we are spending way too much on terror prevention. But the comment is vague - can you express what measures you feel are appropriate, from which we can at least deduce what your proposed reduced spending would look like? It would help to have this in perspective to nail down the specific scope of your view. Second: As Sayonara³ already made clear - "Risk = chance * effect" is not a very solid model for calculating risk of terrorism. It fails to address how our actions modify chance and effect, plus the degree of accuracy to which we can calculate these. It also is very different for a wide range of terrorist threats: Everything from the Cole bombing to kidnapped tourists to nuked cities call in that equation, each with different chance/risk values. Lastly is the issue of crime as I mentioned before: I'll add a scenario... a man is wanted for murder, and on the run. How much money should the government spend tracking him down? If he keeps popping up on the radar in cities but stays one step ahead of law enforcement with expensive raid after expensive raid on where he just was... when do you call the victim's family and say "You know, it's just not cost effective to follow even promising leads anymore, he's too good and by our calculations has no higher than a 50/50 chance of murdering more people in the future, so we'll just ignore him."

If you are suggesting people should expect some risk from living in risky situations and not expect the government to protect them from everything then I agree 100%. However, I think it's worth spending some time and money on reducing those risks and preparing in a manner that reduce loss of life when and if they occur. Your comparisons about WW2 are not valid in today's world - one city such as New York, or LA, or even Denver being destroyed could have huge repercussions in the highly interconnected world we live in today. I am not saying we should mount massive war efforts on every nation that could potentially shield terrorists or open every crate and strip search every single person entering or leaving the country - creating a 100% foolproof shield against terrorism is impossible, but we can help reduce the risks. Personally I think the war in Iraq has increased the strength of terrorists groups and that we haven't handled terrorism well but I don't think simply ignoring it is the solution either. In 10 years from now, it will be far easier for terrorists (not the illiterates in Taliban controlled areas, but those who choose those areas to operate) to get nuclear weapons. At that point, your arguments as to them being a relatively benign threat will be completely invalid - so do we wait until then ignoring them, or start addressing the emerging face of the world today? I honestly think I agree with many of your points, but that you take them to an extreme that is too black and white: I think you are correct to believe our funding is disproportionate compared to other threats (global warming, pandemic threat etc) but if you take it to an absolute level of completely ignoring terrorism then I have to disagree. Lastly, please consider this logic: If someone bombed a corporate head office to hurt it's stock and make money off the markets, we'd want to hunt them down for the crime right? We wouldn't want to ignore them and let them repeat the process, right? So why would we ignore the crime simply because the motivation is different?

CaptianPanic - you give the casualty numbers, but recall the effects on people's psyche and the impact on the economy from 9/11 and terrorism has a pretty large effect. We do face new real threats that are outside any scale seen before thanks to biological and nuclear technology becoming more prolific and widespread. New Orleans never suffered much damage from hurricanes in the past, but it only took one to prove that a bit more money spent on levies could have been really handy. The problem with fighting terrorism is not unlike planning for natural disasters - you may throw a lot of money at them and never have a real problem arise, but if you do, there's no do-overs. I will say that it's easy to go overboard and also throw money at the wrong places that give the appearance of safety while doing little of actual good. That, and I think being so fearful that you compromise on your values (civil rights, privacy, funding torture, etc) is a big mistake. Terrorism may be a overhyped threat, but it is far from insignificant and can result in costs much higher than any previous indicators.

Knock Knock Who's There? Joseph Wurzelbacher Joseph Wurzelbacher who? ....finally - I thought those fifteen minutes would never end!

Has anyone played with iPhone app development? I have an idea I really want to try and build and sell, I think it'll only take 20 hours of code or so (plus time to learn the UI libs) but I don't have a Mac - has anybody tried this or know of good alternative ways to build iPhone apps? A friend of mine has a phone he can test stuff on, but I don't know much about the process and haven't seen too many ways to write code without a Mac (I'll get a cheap one if I have to) and I am curious about potential pitfalls and such. TIA

Not only is this blatantly deceptive, and insulting due to the sheer weakness of the overture, but it makes me feel like there is a certain scope of naivety that borders on calculated attacks upon those with key unfortunate vulnerabilities. Seriously: 1) What are the names that, if we heard them, we'd be unbelievably flattered to know they personally analyzed one's profile? 2) To what depth do they analyze one's profile before deciding it's special? 3) What great special thing did they discover, and what does that "special" little dragnet look like when you look at everyone "special" they found? It's not just a bunch of "Conspiracy Theory" alternative pseudoscience - it's straight up deceptive and manipulate. This whole deal makes me feel sick.

Damnit I've tried studying, prepping, and retaking that test like 20 times and each time I fail! Oh well, maybe try #21...

I'm still trying to forget how bad I did last time...

Fair enough, what I was reacting to more I think was pulling his previous work to try and get a read on the speaker, rather than the speech. I could be a bit overboard, but it reminds me of when someone criticizes the War on Terror policies and gets rebuttals like "this is from a guy that voted against the first Iraq war when Kuwaiti babies were being dumped on the floor as Iraqi soldiers looted hospitals for incubators" - in other words, trying to get into the speaker's head and question their intentions and moral integrity, instead of focusing on the specific instance of speech that is cause for concern.

Oh no.....I must really have a problem, if I've already devised a drinking game involving two of these. That problem of course that I don't have two of these.

I think I have to agree with Pangloss on this. Personally, the air of "unpopular speech intolerance" that existed immediately after the 9/11 attacks in the name of patriotism and solidarity left a really bad aftertaste, and even though I abhor racism and minority bashing it really seems to me that trading one morally righteous cause to silence unpopular opinions for another morally righteous cause doesn't cut it. It's not enough to say I sympathize with those who feel attacked by these cartoons but not with those who are offended by criticizing The War On Terror - the experiences with being on the other side leave me feeling the whole angle is wrong. So really, is there a difference, or is the only difference that we know our convictions on morally are right, and that the neocons were wrong? I think he's generally unfunny, but so is Mallard Fillmore, Rev Phelps and Anne Coulter, and I've been told the last two aren't even cartoons.

Just an interesting followup: this stuff is already getting introduced into kids' toys: http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2009-01-06-force-trainer-toy_N.htm It's not often I get to say this but "Wow, a completely new type of Toy!"

Regarding that cylon: I just started to write a spoiler hidden post, but realized if you are on "No Exit" then you still have "Deadlock" to watch. At the moment I can't recall if it explains that further or not. I've been rewatching the series as well as the new episodes so my continuity may be a bit off. As for how the ending could tie together: I am cautiously optimistic, they've managed to convey a lot of interesting scenarios and concepts so far. One of the stranger fusions in the show is the "hard scifi" and all the religious elements. All the strange visions and God(s) plans and such combined with all the coincidental timing strike me as either leading to a disappointingly simple religious answer or a disappointingly simple mundane answer... but I am withholding judgment until those episodes air.

My money is on the moment someone with the power to close this thread gets ahead by at least one vote.