Sayonara

No, it wasn't part of the genius. Read the Dirk Gently books, or Starship Titanic* - it's all the same show and players. * actually physically written by Terry Jones, which pretty much saves the book.

Don't put words in my mouth - I did not say that HGTTG is a bad book; I said Adams was a bad writer. Having read everything he has written, and having read a vast library of diverse literature against which to compare his work, it's not like I just pulled that out of my ass. He may have written an enjoyable and accessible book, but that does not make him a good writer. His characters are shallow and one-dimensional, his plots banal and predictable, and his scenarios puerile. The only thing he was good at were throwing obtuse jokes at the reader quickly enough to keep up momentum, and coming up with ideas that were so stupid they were brilliant.

5614 was advocating using the computer to reduce casualties. In any case, using a computer to increase casualties would be no more "sick" than using a brain to carry out the same task.

Ha ha It would not surprise me.

You're ignoring the fact that the cost of this vehicle would probably make it prohibitive as a weapon or defence. Also, multiplying the number of complex systems and redundancies is just begging for something to go horribly wrong.

Cloning food would be pointless. We currently have enough food to feed the world - the problem is one of distribution and economy.

Although it's directed at a magazine rather than a person, that's an ad hominem. Surely blindly not trusting it without reason is - at the very least - equally as ridiculous?

No, it sounds like the more dependent species. Because we are intelligent enough to have identified it as a risk to our persons. Have you any idea how much devastation 6.5 billion dogs would cause? Imagine the smell

What? That Douglas Adams was a crap writer, or that he selected that number randomly? Surely you can't want me to take back his deceasedness.

Yes, the peak speed of nervous transmission is about 100ms-1, which is a tiny fraction of light's whopping 299,792,458ms-1. Sounds like this guy is just decorating the push-a-pole argument to make it sound more "oooooooh".

If I have a car that can accelerate to 60mph in half the time it takes yours to reach the same speed, it doesn't necessarily follow that my car goes faster than yours.

The differences are significant enough for your attack on budullewraagh to be irrelevant to the thread, so at best you're on a hobby horse here. I don't think the claim that the government is the direct cause of the suicide has been made. What is being said is that there is an indirect link: social policies and the degree of pastoral intervention from an administration can influence the way people value themselves, and how they see themselves as being valued. Using the political segue that is "if you can't instantly prove a direct link I will declare myself the victor" simply serves to highlight exactly the sort of thing that makes citizens despair of the people who are supposed to represent them. As has been pointed out, you are muddying the waters by arbitrarily assigning terms with meanings that aren't relevant to the context. I can assure you he is not. False Dilemma. You should know better.

Don't you think it might occur to a god that an evolutionary approach might be a better idea? I mean, come on: you can't be saying that you believe in a supreme ruler of everything who happens to be really bad at cost-benefit analysis. Do you mean '[you] find', or do you mean that you read it somewhere?

I didn't really want to get into all this... Whatever bizarre things you expect from people, that has nothing to do with the fact that they can and do pass on their genetic material, which is the point I was originally making. Remember how I said I thought it was an odd thing to say? Well this is why. What's insulting to humanity is that you would dictate how people should behave from one side of your mouth, yet decry what you see as competition to your own personal choice from the other. Dismissing the most fundamental of biological and emotional urges as "fence-sitting" and "jacking off" is pretty offensive, not to mention naive. What? My point here was that two bisexual brothers maintained fiat over the capital city of a nation through fear and protectionism, which is somewhat contrary to your position that "gays can't fight for crap". While we're on the subject: Alexander the Great, and any number of similar historical figures, not to mention hundreds of out sporting celebrities who I would classify as "quite hard". Do some research for god's sake. Prove that a desire to have children is directly linked to sexual preference and you might have something you can use to illustrate a point. Otherwise, you are simply opining. It appears that sexuality is a choice only in a minority of cases. Human rights are neither applicable to god, nor afforded by god. They are a human invention. They are also specifically codified, so waving the phrase "human rights" around without any idea of what they actually comprise is a bad plan (for anyone, not just you.) That's your opinion. I think it's woefully underinformed and fairly prejudiced, but as I said it has nothing to do with the fact that humanity does employ sufficiently diverse means of reproduction to ensure that gay and bisexual individuals can pass on their genes.

So more incomplete than incorrect then.

The ranks of stoners left over from the 60s and 70s are pretty good evidence that THC isn't that great.

What's funny is not the fact that some people believe that, but that they believe such a power-hungry contingent would pursue its goals by pissing about with the headlines on a web site.

No, it can't be seen. JPEG doesn't support native layers.

There are plenty of advanced lifeforms on this planet that don't find Seinfeld funny.

Last time I used SphereXP it was quite rough and buggy - what's the current version like?

There are some that stridulate (as in, make a rasping noise in mating rituals or as a warning signal) by rubbing their telson against the metasoma, which may very well look as if they are trying to sting themselves.

Yes, I am sure.

Wtf? Can't fight for crap? Did you never hear of the Krays? Okay not great examples of military minds, but they pretty much ruled London for a good while, and it wasn't by mincing about wearing lots of pink. Of course gay people can reproduce. It's not even a matter of semantics (people often will say things like "oh they can, but they don't") since many gay couples do use surrogacy as a means of conceiving children, gay individuals may themselves act as surrogates for other couples, and a disproportionate number of gay men donate sperm.

I believe you have posted on this topic before, got hammered into the ground, and didn't dare respond to your own thread. So if you still wish to discuss Archaeopteryx on this site, you can do it there instead. Not that you give a shit about this community you are trying to exploit, but we do actually have a non-duplication policy.