Hannibal

Yes Never, muahahahahah~ :D btw, it looks like chat-addict dont allow proxies. Next idea? Try a different port? Most IRC networks listen on ports 6667-6669, and sometimes 7000 as well.

Exactly. It would be nice if there could be some kind of response from the admins/mods on this? :) If you don't like removing these posts altogether, I think most of those to whom it applies would read RS General, and you could move it there :).

Exactly. This is why you should always do the greater good. Killing 1 person to save the lives of 10 people would be an example of this. I have to disagree with this. Stalin lived pleasant life, but he totally ruined his society with the Great Purges that killed tens of millions by starving them to death. Hitler lived a comfortable life while thousands of Jews were killed each day at Treblinka. So, just because your society isn't made better does not necessarily correlate with your own life being better. Hrm. So how about relating that through? Meaning, if society gets better, *someone* will notice it. That's a given (ie, in the examples you gave, the Jews and the rebellious Russians noticed the society gets worse). This is not what you want, because if they assume that society getting worse is okay, they may do the same to you (so see the point you agreed with). In this case, it's still bad that Stalin and Hitler did what they did because the Jews and Russians suffered from what they did. As for the one vs. 10 debate... yes and no. No because there is no way for us to know whether the lives of 10 of them were worth more than that of the 1 person we're about to kill, but this may be the case (which means we wouldn't want to kill that one person. Eg. choice between killing Mahatma Gandhi or 10 of the 9/11 hijackers, or something like that). Yes because since there is no way for us to judge this, the decision should be left up to God / Allah. I think it's hard to decide what the 'right' thing is in situations like that, perhaps impossible. It's a decision that no human should be confronted with.

alright, building on this: 2. Why should a person care that he is causing other people grief, and why should a person care that society have good things done for it? :wink: (Heaven thing clarified, thanks both you and Eeeeediot) A person should care about causing other people grief because he would not want other people causing him grief. If he were not to care about causing others grief, others would not care about causing him grief. This is not what one wants. A person should care about good things happening for society because a good society (a society to which good things are done) is a benifit for his personal life; his/her life is enriched by having a better society. ==== Back on the Heaven/Hell thing. I haven't mentioned this yet (though you may have inferred at a certain point, or read some of my older posts), but I am a Christian, though a liberal one at that. I just read the following, which may be an interesting comparison with the Islamic view of heaven/hell: http://www.taize.fr/en_article2896.html

Yes. That is correct. Forgive me for carrying through on this, but I'm confused. On the one end, you say non-believers can go to heaven. On the other hand you said that for going to heaven, it is a requirement to be a muslim. How do these two play together? Do we have to go to hell first, temporarily, become a muslim and then go to heaven or something? ---- As for your socratic debate, it's interesting that you propose that. I think you stated your first question wrongly, though. You probably meant, why killing is never right (or always wrong. So let me give it a shot, we'll start simple (these discussions tend to become complicated soon enough, without trying): Killing is wrong because the person whom you are killing will have had people caring for him or her. You are causing these people immense grief by depriving them of their loved one. Furthermore, the victim of your killing could have done so many good things for society, and you deprived him of every possibility to do so. This is why killing is wrong. ---- As for dutch law, it does forbid killing, but not under every circumstance, from what I know (I'm Dutch too). IIRC, it makes exceptions for soldiers in war and in self defence situations where your own life is threatened directly. However, the justice systems here are very strict about these conditions; a soldier in Iraq got charged with first-degree murder when he killed someone looting a building (arguably in a wartime situation). ---- In other news, bas, please moderate your comments. It looks to me as if you are being very hostile towards something just because you don't know it very well. The quotes you made were selective and unfair, and have been validly disproved. There is no need to flame people because they have a different opinion, and frankly said, going mad because they do a better job at defending their opinion than you do attacking it only makes matters worse. We definitely do not want this topic locked; For once, let's actually try and have a sensible debate about religion on these forums? Thanks.

Well, one of the criterion for entering heaven is being a Muslim. :D That's what, in my analogy, is the escalator. Praying five times a day, fasting, giving charity, not drinking alcohol or using any bad drugs, and doing all these things takes more effort and God sees that as more favorable. Being a good person... even without being a Muslim or knowing about Islam, it is easy to be. Follow universal axioms, which never go wrong. So then, why did you say: You seem to me as if you have literally said you can get into heaven being a non-believer, hence, not a muslim? Also, I find it hard to believe muslims do not drink alcohol at all? Is that still the case in current times, or are there exceptions of some sort? And why is smoking pipe allowed but not drinking alcohol? Both are 'drugs' in a sense.

Happy Xmas (War is over) - Yoko Ono & John Lennon Flappie! (Dutch song by a comedian about a small boy whose rabbit ('Flappie') ends up as christmas dinner)

You would have to look into using an http proxy. Before everyone starts shouting at me: an http proxy (the way I refer to the term, anywho), will accept your connections over port 80 (http), and connect to whatever you tell it to connect to on whatever port you tell it to connect on. Unfortunately, I doubt you'd be able to setup an http proxy yourself, and using any public ones might not work due to proxy restrictions the IRC network itself has in place. You can try, however. Googling around should get you plenty of proxy lists.

For a number of reasons: [*:231lk4pg]By the time they're posted, they have already been emailed so people who might have fallen for them will mostly already have done so. [*:231lk4pg]They're all equally stupid, and there's a lot of them. Posting different versions doesn't really give any additional information, nor has it any use: posting a guide on how to recognize scam mails (I think Cameron did one?) does. [*:231lk4pg]They make the announcement board say it has new posts, while I could care less about the latest runescape scam. I do care about new mods/admins, forum updates, rule changes and the like. So for me, this is just annoying since I keep finding out I'm merely looking at more s(c/p)am. [*:231lk4pg]People who fall for one of those mails will fall for all of them, posting a great lot doesn't change that, they'll just click the link in the next one. I'm betting the vast majority of people who get their accounts hacked on these boards had the same password for some other service, or used an easy-to-guess password. Even people who do that are not stupid enough to randomly click emails 'sent' by someone who swears them, every time they log in to the game, that they won't send them email. Decent email programs and sites also show it when addresses are spoofed this way (eg. gmail). There's little hope for people who actually fall for these scam mails.

Indeed, good luck with it. Very interesting and impressive post. I do have one question, I suppose. According to you, not being muslim makes 'the way to the top of the mountain' or 'the way to heaven' if you prefer, harder. I'm going out on a limb here and assume that Islam's criterion for whether or not you'll be admitted to heaven is the subjective 'lead a good life' idea? (eg be good to others, don't kill, don't steal, etc. etc.) If so, I'd assume that Islam also requires its followers to follow the same rules (don't kill, don't steal, etc. etc.). So what makes it harder to reach heaven without being a muslim?

Spend some time correcting your spelling mistakes, then do some extra work on your English.

Yea, and you gave reasoning but you haven't even seen the movies (with exception of LoTR), that's about just as useless, if not more useless. "Because making sequels on movies like that", it's not like they had to write another crappy script for it, it is based on comics that already excisted, just as they didn't have to write a new script for the second and third Lord of the Rings movie. Also, how many sequals based on comics other than X-men and Spiderman could you name? And how much of them are "profressively worse" (if you actually took the effort to look something up instead of just talking cack you would know they scored almost eqaully)? I bet it ain't too much, Hanni. And if you didn't like Star Wars for having "talking furballs" in it, and the movie consits of 70% fighting, why did you like Lord of the Rings? Which consists of 70% walking and the other 30% fighting and is full of all kind of fantasy creatures. You succeded in cranking up the intelligence level, but your post was just as moronic as the ones before you on this topic. Well, at least I encouraged debate and some justifications of opinions, no matter how 'moronic' you think my post was in itself. *points at previous three posts* Which was the point. As for sequels, I was talking sequels in general. As far as I know, it's generally accepted that sequels that were not planned tend to turn out worse, and it's generally thought of as an exception when they turn out better, or equally good. As for looking up ratings, I thought this was about my opinion, not that of others. I didn't say I particularly liked LotR, I gave it my vote because I think I would like Star Wars worse. I think some of the acting in LotR sucks. I think some of the lines and parts of the scripts suck too. However, the underlying books are good literature, imho, and the films added to some of that (ie, the general script was good). I also think that LotR makes you think about some aspects of life; maybe not as much as some other movies, but it still does. Also, I'm willing to bet at least one of the previous posters didn't see all those movies either (purely based on statistics). So now, instead of judging my post as 'moronic', no matter how right you may be, maybe give some justification of your own opinion? I'd be interested in it, and I don't see any need to start berating me for trying to turn this topic into something remotely interesting, even though I didn't start that attempt very well; at least I did it, and we're getting somewhere now.

Some issues I have with this guide: [*:w5das7sz]Nothing about browser security, the only reason you give to switch is speed and tabbed browsing (like everyone will know what the latter is). Why not give advice on some of the options in IE to disable ActiveX controls, or control their execution more stringently? [*:w5das7sz]Sygate Personal Firewall: I have repeatedly attempted to download it from various mirror locations, and each time, both in IE and Firefox, the download stalls at 80%. I have tried this from my home, my parents' home and from uni, so I'm fairly sure it's not the internet connection. I think something about the exe they make you download is broken, but that's just me (bad byte sequence terminating the transfer or whatever). [*:w5das7sz]Nothing about Windows Firewall, and the importance of upgrading to SP2. [*:w5das7sz]Nothing about the Windows Malware removal tool. I know you mentioned the spyware beta thing, but they also have a removal tool for common viruses and malware, which can be downloaded from their site or from windows update. Rumour has it that this will also cope with Sony's rootkit soon enough. Which is good, of course. [*:w5das7sz] Makes it sound like there's free malware. Of course there is, but I doubt that was what you intended to say. [*:w5das7sz]Nothing about routers and their builtin-firewalls, and/or hardware firewalls. [*:w5das7sz]According to you, firewalls 'tell you who is trying to get into your pc'. Uhh, I think they also stop them? Well, mine does, anyway. Also, 'genuine' is not a good word to use in this context. I would suggest 'necessary' or 'useful' or even 'benevolent'. Maybe using the opposite (ie, a 'bad' word like 'malicious') would make more sense. Genuine is whether something is a fact, or actually happening. Believe me, the firewalls you listed should not tell you about attacks that are not really happening. [*:w5das7sz]I dislike your approach in only naming free software. While I generally like free software (as in libre, beer, freedom) better, security-wise there are plenty of good paid products on the market, some or maybe most better than the free ones. A definite first on that list would be Norman, imho, because as you said, Norton is kind of bloated. I have no experience with McAfee, I'll take your word for it. Norman is good though, and it's used by most industrial and educational institutions for their network security. Consider adding some links to your guide. [*:w5das7sz]Your first suggestion says to backup the registry. While this is useful at a lot of times, I think you should explain why you're suggesting it here. Telling people what to do without telling them what they're doing, or why, is bad. [*:w5das7sz]Testing software. How secure are you? Why not link the portscan site from grc.com, or Microsoft Baseline security Analyzer. [*:w5das7sz]Upgrade, update, upgrade, update! You didn't mention anything about that. While it's about the most important thing in keeping your computer safe; if you don't update, all that software is not going to protect you against new worms, viruses and other trash that gets out. [*:w5das7sz]Rootkits. As the new hype in (in)security-land, some links regarding Sony's new rootkit system, and the detection program on sysinternals.com could use some linkage (heck, most of the stuff on sysinternals.com could do with linking, though it's generally intended to be used by people more into computers than the average home user). [*:w5das7sz]General spelling and grammar issues. Please reread the entire guide and fix them. It'd make it much more readable.

*gasp* Heya Sharper :) Long time no see. I think I've posted before on this thread. In case I haven't done so, I prefer Firefox, customised to near-death. *shrug* To each their own.

That would generate abusive replies by the posters whose posts you are reporting, and would hence easily turn into a flamewar. The advantage of a report abuse feature is that nobody but the moderators / admins will know who reported the thread (anonymity in a sense). As for the server bogdowns, the implementation of this feature in vBulletin simply creates an admin/mod-only board where new topics are auto-generated based on the reports people send in. Then mods and admins can discuss the contents of the post on that new topic, and decide what to do if it isn't blatantly obvious (eg. total and complete spam posts will not need much discussing, but sometimes there's more ways to look at a post). So the server load would not be much more than suggested by you. Of course, after topics/posts have been dealt with, the report topics can be removed by the admins on an as-needed basis.

Workaround: write long posts in notepad, save them every now and then, and copy paste them into the forum when you're done.

Right. So can someone please explain why this topic isn't locked as spam? So far 1 person gave a reason for why they liked one movie better than the other (though they haven't given any reason why they 'hate' one of the actresses in it). Some of the other 'contributions' consist merely of 'LOL'. Yet another reason why I want to see polls disabled on all boards, if they're not already. In a (probably vain) attempt to crank up the intelligence level on this thread a bit: I have never seen Star Wars (none of them, whatever you want), by the principle that any movie that has talking furballs in it and consists of fighting for at least 70% is average at best. Hence, Lord of the Rings gets my vote in the first showoff. I haven't seen X-men 1 or 2, and haven't seen Spiderman 2. I give it a tie, because making sequels on movies like that usually makes them progressively worse.

He never said that they were. He said that he thought few people ever made better music than Mozart for Beethoven, except for Possibly Liszt, or maybe the Beatles. Reading is useful. Also, please refrain from using that damn smilie. It makes you look stupid.

They both suck. Don't get Windows XP Media Center Edition. Don't get 512MB of RAM if you plan to do any gaming on that computer.

Assuming it's true (moral absolution), horrible things are never justified, because "horrible" things, would contradict the moral Law. And how would you know it is true? You just assume? Just like everyone else who believes in an absolute moral Law? They contradict eachother - which is right? Would you mind explaining how they contradict each other, and what exactly are "they'? :confused: Sorry for not understanding what you meant there. Insane assumed there was some absolute moral law that was true. Supposing that was true, you would still need a way to figure out yourself what that law is (ie, which one of the infinitely many possible moral laws is the absolute true moral law). So you would not be able to *know* what law is true (at least, that was the argument I meant to give). Then, since you don't know, you can reason to it and assume (like, maybe your reasoning is sound and you're right, but you're never 100% sure) that one of these moral laws is the true absolute moral law. Then someone else comes along and thinks another absolute moral law is true. You would not have any way of determining which of you is right, hence the concept of having some absolute moral law which is always right does not help us - because we would not be able to 'know' this law. I hope that was a better explanation, I admit my previous post was somewhat vague :). Assuming morals are relative: Horrible according to what? This is where we run into a problem, there's nothing to justify, because horrible is a relative term. What's horrible to one person could be amazingly kind to another person, so justification becomes relative as well - justice ceases to exist and all actions become impossible to interpret one way or another. How can you possibly call us arrogant, assuming morals are relative? Arrogant is now, a relative term, that only applies to your point of view - trying to force that view on us, is simply being arrogant yourself. But wait, I can't use the word arrogant because it's relative! This is ridiculous! We can't even communicate using moral/personal terms anymore because they only apply to the person using them. It's not ridiculous, it means everyone is entitled to an opinion. The law is formed based on the common denominator of morals amongst the majority of a country's population, and you are judged on that. In the same way, sometimes judges find people guilty or innocent based on the law, while they themselves disagree with that (one of the reasons it's so hard to be a judge). See also Matthew 7:1-7. Might I ask what that passage has to do with what you said? "Judge not, lest you be judged. For with the measure you use, so it will be measured unto you." You know, if you believe that there is a universal moral law which everyone is accountable to, then what's wrong with judging people according to it, since you yourself are judged according to it? It declares others guilty just as it declares you guilty. As a Christian, this is where God's grace and the death of Christ come in - they enable you to avoid the punishment for moral guilt, since Christ took that guilt. Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent. And yes, everyone is entitled to an opinion. Their opinion may be wrong - I know I've had and do have many wrong opinions - but they're entitled to their own opinions no matter how incorrect they may be. It's their right to be wrong. Note that I don't mean to sound arrogant, since I make all those same mistakes. There is something wrong with judging people according to the law you think is universal, because they may not agree with it, and you cannot be sure that your law is the actual universally right one. The point of the passage, from my point of view, was to illustrate that it doesn't make sense to judge only from one law that only you support - it makes much more sense to take the common denominator of the majority of the population, as that way most people would actually agree with the law most of the time. For me, the passage actually warns you not to judge. It says that if you judge someone else, from your own (selfish) moral standpoint, then you too will be judged, from someone else's (selfish) moral standpoint. So the best thing would be not to judge by yourself, but find a way to have a universal 'thing' judge everyone. From a Christian standpoint, this 'thing' would be God, of course. While on earth, given that we need justice systems and police and whatnot, I would say it would have to be said common denominator of the moral laws people agree upon, incorporated in a law like countries have and whatnot. The judge thing illustrates that: a judge may not personally agree with the verdict, but the law should be set up so that the majority of people would agree with it.

So you wouldn't use content-based ads? That's usually the best way to have ads which are more likely to be interesting to the people using the website :-? I don't think 'Free screensavers' is much of a content-based ad. That's the ad I got on the top of this page, anyway. (featuring two tweeties shaking their behinds and two rather voluptuous looking women wearing far too little). So yeah, content-based ads sound better. Though, blindly relying on google ads and so on is bad because they will also list, for example, cheating programs and/or bots.

That's the most stupid comment I've seen on the entire thread. Seriously, I wonder how you dare make jokes about the Beatles when this is a discussion about musical genres. That you started, for crying out loud.

I once was free from work, at about 8 in the evening, decided I'd go and eat a fast food meal, and then walked past the cinema and saw an advert for Troy. Now, in hindsight the movie was crap. However, I didn't know it at the time, so I just went and saw the damn thing, on my own. And I don't really care, either. The only boring bit was the break, because it's just 15 minutes of sitting around doing squat all waiting for the film to start again (buying anything in the cinema doesn't even cross my mind as they overcharge by about 200% or so). So yes, I've been to the cinema alone, and I don't think there's anything weird about it. I've also watched films at home by myself plenty of times.

The stupid thing is that the two 'towers' are actually pieces of paper (try 2 and 4 in wingdings). That's the power of imagination for you. And as said, the address is bs. It's also not the flight number. And it's older than methusalem. In short, spam.

Blaming a program when you are the one falling for a scam AND not installing security updates is stupid at best. And nobody said Firefox doesn't have any flaws - it has less flaws than Internet Explorer, and it's been quicker at fixing those flaws than the people at Microsoft have been in fixing IE. Of course, if you don't update...