ParanoiA

Actually, there's a third possibility. That the parents had unprotected sex after considering the consequences and then chose to ignore other's ideas of morality. Just like my refusal to sign up for Islam's ideas of ethics, I refuse to sign up for yours as well. I choose to give greater moral value and consideration for a person's right to govern what goes on inside their bodies than I do the life that grows within them. And I make no moral or ethical judgements about sexuality to begin with. Your morality code appears to rely on passing judgement on sexuality in the first place, which is what creates the glow of "negativity" before we even get out of the gate. You rely on this negative to further a point about what they "deserve" or "don't deserve". That's intrusive, arrogant behavior of the self-annointed that we see from both sides of the political spectrum now. I have a question for you. Would you violate another country's sovereignty to save a life? That's what you're advocating here. To violate the sovereignty, quite intimately bordering on rape, of an individual.

I shared it with my cubical neighbors and we all got a chuckle out of it.

Fair enough, but I never said I supported warrantless wire tapping and I remain strongly against government or private intrusion, particularly when it's fed by fear. That's a word I feel compelled to level at the conservatives on these subjects, by the way. They've allowed fear to corrupt their principles.

I hope so.

Like when peope refuse to give cpr because they might get sued or criminally charged if they screw up...yeah, great idea. I don't know about you, but I'm not real impressed with a conscience that values litigious harmony over perceived human need. That's my chosen principle and I'll suffer it. Remember, we're talking about requests from the government, the federal authority, in the exigence of a declared war. Not to mention the obvious security interest telecomm companies have in participating in the first place - they are potential targets themselves. You'd be surprised how many attempts are made to break into telecomm networks. Your analogy doesn't work unless you add some bit about the police telling you the guy has a bomb and then compelling your participation. And then yes, I'd grant you immunity for being misguided by the police. The police would be punished. In my world anyway... Intent matters to me ethically though, which is my point. I can't ethically level such animosity at these companies for participating in a wartime effort. So Frederick Douglass was wrong for trying to escape slavery? Blind allegiance is no better than whimsical enforcement. I advocate neither, rather that we see the sense in obvious well intentioned public cooperation with federal authorities on matters made important by the american people and their media machine. Why punish that public unless you already have issues with that particular public?

The problems is, what are you really punishing them for? What did they get out of it? It's not like some malicious plot to victimize americans and they profited from it. They didn't get jack from it. See, I'm the guy that just can't punish people for freaking out and going too far in a crisis. I can say they're wrong. I can call them out and show them how they abandonded principle out of fear and so forth. But punish? Why? Even if they broke the law, I still can't in good conscience, punish them for doing what they believed was the right thing to do in this crisis - what they believed was protecting american citizens. They screwed up and let fear override their better judgement - under the misguided belief they were protecting us. Why do they deserve to be punished for being over-protective? The court will not split hairs here. If a law was broken, they would be punished. Even if that law appeared to jeopardize the safety of american lives. I'm not looking for a population of mindless robots that follow the law even in the face of seeming annihilation - right or wrong, I'm more partial to a population that questions its laws especially in the face of catastrophe.

So can we start buying their cigars now?

And publicly traded corporations are as likely to be misdirected as any citizen. I don't carry a law book with me for when I get pulled over, so I can check and be sure that each instruction I'm given is legal or not. And I gaurantee you these corporations at least DID consult their attorneys and still felt the need to cooperate. The only point in punishing them is in support of the unsubstantiated belief that they are "in on it" with Bush and company - the big bad corporations and their big bad bully leader are out to get us and using terrorism as an excuse. It couldn't possibly be that they, just like the liberal establishment, thought they were doing the right thing - and still do - that their intentions were benevolent - oh no, not that, they're all evil money grubbing bastards that used the opportunity to steal our freedoms for....uh....something....not really sure what they got out of it - but you know those bastards are evil and deserve it! Sorry, I'm not buying it. The government is wrong, period. The innocent folks that followed their directions are not.

No, don't let them perpetuate this crap. Smoking is not stupid. It depends on what your goal is. If you're trying to live as long as possible, then yes, smoking is stupid. That's not a smart way to reach your goal. If your trying to live as rich as possible, enjoy crazy and self-dangerous behavior, fortifying a quality lifestyle with little concern over longevity, then smoking isn't stupid at all. It fits right in. Why do we have this propensity to make value judgements about everyone? Why are we STILL judging lifestyle choices?

I like seeing the depth in his reasoning though. Kind of nice to see something in the way of principle creep into a politician. Yep. Weird huh? Duplicate laws and explicit constitutional intents certainly never stopped anybody before. Hell, maybe I'm wrong about this McCain guy...

Maybe they can't speak about it... Ok, I admit, that was stupid.

Hey thanks for the tips Cap'n. I actually installed Motherboard Monitor yesterday and it's showing my chip temp anywhere from 150 degrees to 180 degrees F. The "alarm" setting is at 158 F, so I'm assuming it's getting really hot. My problems have doubled, though. Now my audio drivers and audio card isn't found nor working, and I haven't even looked in that direction let alone change anything. Everything has just basically fallen apart over the course of this week, so I'm really at a loss now what to do besides get a new system. I know I can get a new motherboard, cpu and memory combo for what I consider to be relatively cheap - like 150 I think. And I figure I can just reuse my peripherals, unless any of them actually prove to be faulty. I just don't think my problems are with my hard drive, cd drive, network card, video card or audio card. Although I have no real intelligent reason to assume that... Just so you know, I did try this. In fact, the hot readings I was getting was with the case opened up and I turned off the heat in my basement. I don't know how cool it actually got, but I did notice quite a difference once I closed the case up - as in the temperature reading increased about 6 degrees almost immediately, and that became the new average. The temp only took off up to 180 degrees after I tried to view a Youtube video and it hasn't been the same since.

Cool. I can't wait to try this. I have heard of Spybot, I'll check that one out too. Downloaded and ran Spybot and it found nothing. Also opened this Hosts file and didn't see any references at all to https. I did reseat my RAM modules and things seem to be more stable as the computer booted right up without any restarting interuptions. But I haven't tried running my Madden game yet, and that's usually a decent catalyst for these issues. Also (you guys are gonna' laugh now) but what is that chip that's right next to the CPU? It's much smaller, but it has its own heatsink and fan - and the fan isn't spinning. I kept peaking at it and I never saw it doing anything. I'm wondering...

Because "hate" speech is subjective. They could have made the case that speech promoting the abolition of slavery is hate speech.

Oops! Sorry about that...

This lies at the heart of the matter, if I'm reading Pangloss correctly. You see it conveniently as "rhetoric" with no weight worth debating about - I believe this is because it's a cause you agree with. Period. Pangloss, and I, and...nobody else I guess...see the hypocritical nature of the your's and the board's essential wholesale labeling of this as harmless rhetoric. If we were talking about a prominent, religious leader advocating criminal charges for those guilty of "creationism defiance", this board would be lit up with emotional charge after emotional charge. Somehow, I don't think the "harmless" would quite make it...

I'm not entirely convinced of my virus and malware sweeps. But, I did download Ad-Aware and its latest definitions and found 10 infected files, mainly cookies (even though I thought I had deleted them), none of them were registry keys, if I remember correctly. After removing them, the problem seems no different. I ran the scan again to see if they were "back", but it doesn't find anything now. Like I said, I'm not real sure about Ad-Aware, but that's the only free one I know of that doesn't plant its own spyware on your computer when you install it. Yeah, the whole https thing is really weird. That's a brand new issue that just popped up saturday. That's the issue that finally pissed me off enough to try looking for solutions. I'm generally pretty lazy about computer mainenance. So if I'm asking questions, it's probably getting desparate. Any ideas how to clear such a thing? IE still shows 128-bit Cipher strength and Cryptographic services are running. I've cleared "SSL state" and reset all of my IE options to default. I even tried re-installing IE 6 SP 1 but it says my current version is newer. If I try to install IE 7, the only upgrade available (beta I think) it says it cannot verify the integrity of the setup files...I can not catch a break on this thing.

Thanks for the replies. Interesting too, because a friend here at work also suggested processor over heating and RAM issues. To foodchain - your solution is noted. In fact, hehe...I'm planning on moving ahead with it when we get our stimulus package checks.

First of all, my heart goes out to anyone who actually cares enough to read this, let alone respond. Most of these problems, if not all, I suspect are related. But I have no idea where to look, or what hardware to check out or suspect. 1) When playing Madden 2006, the only computer game I play and the only graphics heavy application I run, the computer will just restart at some seemingly random moment. Sometimes 5 minutes into a game, other times well after an hour of playing. I’ve used two different video cards now, and this happens regardless. 2) Sometimes the computer will just suddenly freeze. Will stop responding altogether and will presumably stay there forever. The mouse pointer frozen on the screen, no reaction from the keyboard. (haven’t actually experienced this one in a while though…) 3) Cannot access web pages that require some kind of security or encryption. So, no email, online banking…etc. I’ve actually found a lot of info on this and have tried every suggestion I’ve found. 4) The worst problem of all…when my computer restarts, it goes through this process of booting up and then restarting again midway through – sometimes it will get as far as displaying the desktop and then, click, restarting again. Of course, that’s if I’m lucky. Sometimes during this process it will get lost altogether – my monitor light will indicate no signal coming from the video card and the hard drive will eventually quit reading. I have to reset it or turn it off manually, and then the process starts again. Eventually, if I keep at it, it will finally boot up without interruption So, there it is. Any ideas?

But wait a minute, you made the distinction between people who don't believe in global warming and people who do, but don't care - as to whether or not Suzuki was proposing their punishment. That must mean they can claim they simply don't believe in GW, and escape punishment. Nice. No, because global warming is not a specified threat. Fire is. Hurricane is. GW is not. Figure out who should be the agency to fix the problem, and then give them the authority that goes with it. Let's put our money where our mouth is. If global warming is truly a threat, universally agreed, then let's act like it. Half of my suspicions come from the fact that we don't act like it.

You know, I'm not real sure why, but he says he plans to ride it out all the way to the convention. He says this after he admits the chances of a brokered convention are nil, and he only expects have about 40 plus delegates going into it. I guess it's all about getting the message to Washington. He also claims no third party run.

So all the politicians that say "I don't care" can just say "It isn't happening" and they're off the hook? This is an argument I would expect from a lawyer, not an objective academic. Have they been given the specific duty and authority to defend the public from specifically "Global Warming" disaster? I mean, I see the connection, but it's not like global warming is universally accepted - rightly or wrongly. That's the distinction I keep getting back to. Fire and hurricane protection and recovery are specifically delegated responsibilities. Global Warming specifically has not been accepted wholesale, much less assigned authorative responsibility to any government entity. Well, you're certainly right it is their responsibility to warn and protect me from some things since we've deliberately assigned those specified details to a government agency. And we have an agency set up and designed specifically for the purpose of assessing food and drugs. They have the power to enforce as well. The same cannot be said of GW. Granted, the EPA is an arguable agency for this responsibility, but I'm not sure they have the same authority and potency as a fleet of fire trucks screaming down my street. Nobody says "we don't believe in fire, get out of here!". All that... But hey, we can agree to disagree. And I'm curious what Swans on Tea is all about. Is there a story behind that phrase?

I would say yes in those cases because that responsibility, those particular job functions, are spelled out and delegated to specific government entities who's sole purpose is to execute those functions for specified events - forest fires, hurricanes and etc. We have not delegated responsibility and authority for GW defense to any government entity. There's no GW emergency unit. I believe my analogy stands. No strawman. And my analogy was based off of yours. You made the ascertion that government was criminal if it didn't warn its citizens of the dangers of cigarette smoke. I don't see why the government should be held criminally responsible for warning its citizens of every conceivable danger known to man. Why is it their responsibility to warn you of anything?

I never heard a government official tell me cigarettes will NOT harm me. No strawman. You can disagree with the analogy, like swansont, but there's no strawman here. The government is not to blame for my lack of knowledge on ANYTHING. I am. Particularly with american government since it comes from me in the first place. We are not ruled by a King. We rule the government. We are the boss. To legislate against the people's wishes, in favor of GW, arguably, would be dishonest and disloyal to the constituency (perfectly free to do that, just making the point that they are "damned if they do, damned if they don't"). If the people believe in GW and want legislation that compliments the threat then they should elect folks to do that. But punishing those that are doing what we, the employer, has requested, is wrong.

Then Ron Paul ought to be your buddy since he wants to shut down the department of education. He hasn't mentioned the space program at all, although it certainly doesn't fit in his ideology, so I would think this would clear up your problem.