Hannibal

It has been proven that beer does NOT make you fat. When you drink beer it results to being lazy and sitting around doing nothing. The sitting around doing nothing gets you fat. Right on.I don't wanna get old the point where every single joint and muscle in your body hurts. Therefore I don't really care if I have to sacrafice 5 years of my life to have a good time. Why is weed illegal and beer legal? I have no clue. At parties and trips I think that alcohol causes more problems than weed. When you light upa joint, you feel relaxed and love the world. With alcohol people have a time period where there all energetic and crazy. I think we need to legalize weed. Weed is legal in some places in Holland, I believe, as long as you take it in small quantities and in environments with people present who know what they're doing (I've posted this before, and again, your classmates do NOT fall into that category, no matter how many times they (say they)'ve done it before). That is, there are special coffeeshops where the government sort of regulates. So is my understanding of it anyway - I don't do weed. That said, I have a problem with your rosey view of weed. Sure, if you have a good trip, you'll be relaxed and love the world. If you have a bad one, you'll feel depressed anad close to committing suicide. Weed just enhances your emotional reactions to stuff, it doesn't make you relaxed and whatever, it just shuts down lots of reason/ratio which means that you're more susceptible to emotional factors, and that your senses sometimes 'notice' things which aren't really there/happening. This can result in you being relaxed (it often does), but it can have other consequences too. The effects of alcohol are similarly dependant on how you feel at that time. A month ago I was at a dinner and had about one and a half glass of wine. I had slept really badly the nights before, and was really tired (the three nights before, I think I'd slept a total of about 12 hours. Which is just way too little for me). After I drank alcohol, I felt even more tired, and needed to concentrate on simple stuff (even walking, or opening a door). That usually won't happen with just over a glass of wine, but if your body is deregulated in other ways, it just kicks in a whole lot sooner, and it definitely doesn't necessarily mean you'll go all energetic. Wish it did. ~ Edit: Schwarzenegger, who were you talking to? You didn't quote anyone and the post above yours seems unrelated...

Field hockey, ice hockey or street hockey?

This is pretty useless. If you've ever transferred a large file over your average 100mbit home LAN cable, you know you never get the actual 100mbit, more like 10-50mbit, depending on the computers in play. Why? Because (a) that speed is only theoretical, and I'd imagine that's more so when talking about the internet. If you have a 2Gbit connection, that doesn't mean the server at the other end has; (B) your computer and the server need to process all this data and send it or save it to your harddisk. Ever tried copying 200mb of files from one disk to another one? Did you do that in under 1 second? Of course not, especially older computers (please don't expect these 'communities' have state of the art computers at home) will not be able to cope with that. So, the actual 2gbit is something you'll probably never get. Because even if the servers you're using are able to provide enough data for you, if you have a few thousand of those homes, and in the evening everybody's online, then that giant stream of data is going to get throttled somewhere, probably at a switch which doesn't like the 2tbit/s amount of data. I think it's actually better if consumers are not allowed to have more than 8-10Mbit/s bandwidth. Because giving everybody access to 2gbit/s will (a) grealy help internet crime/DoS attackers, (B) it means all the servers out there will have to start buying new hardware, because right now they sure as hell wouldn't be able to cope, and © it means a few people filesharing will be able to grind the 'net to a halt, because the massive data flow currently can't be handled by switches.

I think he's probably talking about the fact that FF 1.5 is known not to run too well on Mac, while there are several custom builds that run better (FF 1.5.0.1 also has a bunch of fixes for Mac). (here 'well' and 'better' concern speed only, and some people report no trouble at all)

I demand we have another corollary to Godwin's Law, so that in addition to those who use a comparison with Hitler, people who misspell more than half a word a sentence (on average) are also automatically excluded from further debate, and forfeit all their rights to participate in this forum. Seriously, it's not all that much trouble to spell properly. The only reason not to do it is to post quickly, and to post quickly is to post foolishly, and to post foolishly is to destroy other people's fun. Hence, I reserve myself the right to correct anyone whose spelling is lacking the level of correctness an average highschool freshmen achieves in essays for his/her English class, particularly if whomever I would be correcting has English as their native language. I fail to understand why being outside of school is an excuse to spell poorly. PS: Lionheart, even your signature is misspelled. You realize that that means there are now roughly 2525 posts out there which show the same misspelling, right?

I'm just putting this in another reply, but the CNN article is terrible. ~ Another edit: The CNN article is terrible. Just a few important things that are either left out or blatantly wrong: * This Tomanovic guy is not exactly his only lawyer. Milosevic was legally representing himself, by choice, until the tribunal forced two lawyers to take over because he was too ill to go to trial, and it was holding up the case. The court-appointed lawyers tried to resign at one point, since Milosevic didn't want anything to do with them, but the court forced them to continue trying. * He did not plea non-guilty. He repeatedly condemned the court and said it did not have the authority to indict or try (sp?) him, and as he refused to plea anything, the court officials noted down a not guilty plea, which he in fact didn't make. * His death didn't come "Just a few months shy of the completion of the trial". That is just pure speculation, as nobody knows how long the trial would have dragged on had he survived. It should have been done years ago. * As for the tribunal 'killing him', to be honest, the guy had to his disposal: > A gym > Serbian television > His own courtyard > Apparently other luxuries, which I can't check anymore because the BBC revised their article... He was also examined by medical staff when he or his lawyers requested, and his request to be treated in Russia was under appeal. I'm pretty sure he would have been able to get the same treatment in Holland (it's not as if Europe has lesser medical technology then Russia, quite the contrary I think), so it beats me why he didn't want that. He was told to keep rest, and if he didn't do that, then that's not anyone's fault but his own. Lastly, he had been under permanent surveillance earlier (as in, 24-hour camera), but this surveillance was removed on his own request (he actually had to ask the court and file a request and whatnot, and in the end the court decided it could be taken away). Surely you can't blame the tribunal that way that they didn't find out he was dead until the next morning...

Er? IIRC Goering hung himself in his cell or something - Milosevic died a natural death. ~edit Checking my facts, he committed suicide using cyanide. Point stands. And to add to that, he committed suicide just before his sentence was supposed to be carried out. Milosevic hasn't even been sentenced, so officially he's still innocent (though I think he's guilty and should have gotten life in prison if he had remained alive long enough). ~end edit I also like how some news sites really make it a done deal that he was guilty and an [wagon] (ie, CNN with its "Butcher of the Balkan") and other sites are much better about it saying that the "former president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, accused of...". Not that I don't believe he's guilty - but it annoys me how incredibly biased and sensationalist the media are sometimes.

I think the main point is that he wants fancy looking mathematical equations, with lots of nice symbols such as the capital Greek sigma, Leibniz's sum notation, and/or whatever else he needs for physics stuff. So, yeah. You can do Insert > Object > Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0 to get a new equation. If it's installed. If it's not installed, pop in your installation cd, and you should be able to update the installation, and add the component using the custom install options. If that won't work for whatever reason, you can look into LaTEX like runesmithie suggested, or into MathML. MathML will work in any XHTML document when loaded into Firefox 1.5. If your teacher complains it doesn't render in IE, tell him to use a better browser. I'm fairly sure Opera will cope too. I should hope so, anyway. Otherwise, there are probably third party plugins to render the equations. I'm not sure whether Word can import from MathML when used in HTML docs, I somehow doubt it... If you choose to use LaTEX, you will end up with having a PDF file with your stuff in the end. I should note your teacher might not like that if he needs to correct it. Especially if your teacher is not very tech-savvy. You can also give him the source .tex file, of course, which will work too. You might get extra points for using LaTEX if the teacher knows about it (most Maths/Computer Science/Physics papers are written in LaTEX, from what I've been told).

And the tribalfusion ads are probably from this site ;) Firefox blocks them pretty well though.

Which is basically what I said two pages ago. I'm still sitting here wondering why both insane and all the 'atheist' people completely ignored me/it, and went off flaming eachother to a point where people are walking away because they think they might just have driven their point a bit too far.

I think something that was left out here was that nobody would be a good person (good in the absolute sense of the word), because there would be no absolute morality. That's the point he's trying to make, anyway. So, I disagree. Society has rules, and although not absolute, they can make people 'good' persons in their society. Whether any kind of supernatural thing (God if you wish) thinks that is good is something which we'll never know while we're still alive. Even if you're a theist, there is no way to know God's idea of what 'good' is, there are only interpretations of vague texts that somehow seem to have originated from the divine (to put it sceptically). So even if the theist is right, there is no way to judge if someone is 'truly good' anyway. Which means the entire point is moot anyway. All we have now is (fallible) human metrics of what good and evil consist of - those metrics are both bound to culture and to persons as individuals. This is probably one of the reasons why the bible does say: So please, don't make inflammatory remarks about how atheists can never be a truly good person if they're right. Nobody can, in that case, but nobody can tell the difference between a 'truly' good person and the next guy if they're wrong either. So again, the point is moot. Atheists can be good people in our human-judged value system too, and religion has squat all to do with that.

I'm going to quote Dan Brown on this. Wait, don't run away. Listen what he said in some meeting for book authors: Transcript by me, audio available on Dan Brown's website. (click the "Live Audio" link, this piece is at about 17 minutes into the talk). So, I think that's pretty much what I said before. And I also think I'll just stop posting to the topic if people don't stop being absolutists about what they think is 'right', or how people who believe in anything are 'dumb', or how people who don't accept any God are going to go to hell/whatever-you-want-to-call-that-place.

I think DragonFirenze is looking for video cameras, not still cameras, jak. Which means that finding one below 100 USD is like, impossible.

What kind of kernel were you using? I was at FOSDEM this weekend (just got home), had like 3 times my kernel panicked, and every time a hard reboot solved the problem. It reconstructed the swap drive (and the open files on the main drive) without any problems.

In that case the topic served no purpose anyway. At least now it has some purpose, no matter how many times we've seen it before. As for everyone hating the thread itself: if you are so annoyed by it, then don't post on it? In any community, there'll eventually be new members who want to know the opinions of existing ones on certain topics, and who want to discuss. It is inevitable that in this process, certain topics will be discussed again and again at regular intervals. I don't see why that is a problem.

I never said all religious people were any of the things you just said. You said religion as a thing caused this, thus, people affected by religion should have those traits, by your own comments a few pages back. I wish it wasn't like that, but you're probably right. Whether that is the fault of religion, or of the interpretation of it is another matter. No I'm not. I believe that at very least religions promote a "them and us" mentality. While this mentality is intrinsic to human nature, I think religion makes it considerably worse. I have no interest in prodding around a Bible to prove that Christianity is homophobic, or the Qur'an to prove that Islam is a hateful religion. Those aren't my arguments. My argument is that religion as a concept causes the problems, whether this be through correct intepretation of texts or incorrect interpretion of texts is inconsequential. Hrm. I kind of see your point, however, I don't understand why the human interpretation of it is irrelevant. For example, wars have been justified by the constitution of countries. Let's assume that at least a few of those wars were not 'right' (ethically speaking). Does that say anything about the constitutions they were justified by?

Which was the point. The way you put it, it looked as if all Christians would agree with you, which is not the case. That's true, to an extent. Not all theists do this, though. Did a buddhist monk ever talk to you trying to get you to become a buddhist? :P (though I must confess I'm not sure if you can say Buddhists believe in a "God" kind of thing, they are religious anyway) And technically, the people who try to get you to join Amnesty, the Book Society or whatever else are also just doing marketing. The difference is usually that the religious people don't get paid for it (in money, anyway), and are concerned about you, instead of about what they're trying to get you to join. Anyhow, personally, I think everyone should be able to decide for themselves. Forcing your beliefs on anyone won't help them. Trying to get them to accept them is not much better, in my eyes.

Can you please stop spreading all this nonsense claiming it's in "our prophecies" ? Those parts of the bible are disputed, and it's dangerous to suggest everyone who's a Christian agrees with them. I most certainly don't. Uh, right. Because religion kills tens of thousands of people in mere seconds? Quit the rethorics please. All forms of religion? Somehow I feel like you have little clue of what you're talking about. Buddhist monks, are they infected with some kind of virus? Are they arrogant? Are they violent? Are they ignorant? Are they racist, homophobic or sexist? You know, I think you're generalizing way too much, which is, in fact, an ignorant thing to do. Face it, if we didn't have religion, that would in no case mean all these problems would suddenly drop off the face of the earth. You're confusing religion with certain people who say they are religious. And, you know, I could give a similar list for dumb atheists (no, not all atheists are dumb, but the few that are -->), because after all, they have no reason to be moral except for the law, so those are the people you see killing their fellow highschool students, raping your sisters and nieces, tackling your grandma when she's doing her shopping because it's "fun"... does anyone feel like I'm generalizing yet?

Nor is My space, and we all know what the media are saying about that.

It doesn't make your computer 'faster'. It might feel snappier in some cases. At the very least, it should crash less often than Windows does. Oh, and something I forgot to mention in my earlier post, you can just use GIMP instead of Photoshop.

You could try running photoshop on it using Wine, but given your lack of understanding on what it really is I doubt you'd succeed in doing it (if it's at all possible in the first place). At the very least, installing it will take more than your average Windows install of any regular application which is just about clicking Next and "I agree" long enough to get to the good stuff.

It sucks. They only distribute it to people in the UK (based on some stupid IP-sniffing script), and even then it's a Windows Media player-only format with DRM on it as well... It's actually quite ironic, given that the IT Crowd guys themselves have EFF stickers all over their office, including "Fair use has a posse" and "MP3 is not a crime".

As some of you know, I've had a Yamaha CLP digital piano for some time now, and I thought it'd be fun to try to record some of the thing I play on it to MIDI files. So I'm looking for a good MIDI sequencing program. Please don't just google for me and copy-paste some results - I can do that myself. I'm looking for something you have actually used, of which you know it's good :). IE, I'm looking for recommendations. Free programs are better, but if you are really sure it's really good, I suppose paying for something for a change wouldn't be a bad thing ;)

Age 16 is too low to drive, and too low to vote, in my opinion. I don't think these people are mature enough to decide about politics. Setting up an organization is one thing - having a sensible opinion about politics is something different. (see the Flat Earth Society or something like that...) As for taxes, your 8-year old brothers/sisters/relatives also pay taxes when they buy an icecream from their pocket money. Are you going to let them vote? That's a bogus point - you're not of age so your legal guardian (usually your parents) represents you. I'm also disturbed that someone who's apparently having a lot of trouble spelling in their native language (without even mentioning punctuation or grammar) thinks they are 'mature' enough to vote, because they had 'classes' about political subjects. Did you have English classes too? Oh, and before I forget... youth is influenced by older people and/or commercial entities (eg. by advertising or teaching) way too easily. And as far as I know, it's accepted in biology that your brain will not have fully developed before the age of 18 (or maybe 21, I don't remember exactly).

Pretty much the same thing here. I saw him hanging out on IRC sometimes, the few times I was in there. My condolences to his family and friends. :(