ember3579

Don't worry about quality. Just buy whatever looks cheap and durable. Since I live in the Deer Hunting Capitol of the United States, it's not too hard to find them being sold for as little as $5, even $1 if I'm willing to use a mini-knife (~1 inch long blade). Also, try and buy something to sharpen them with. There should be something cheap and serviceable in the same section as the knives in any big store, but kitchenware knife sharpeners could also work. If you're looking for something truly yours, try and find something with a handle as long as your hand is wide, if not a little bigger. Don't worry as much about blade length, that's not what a pocket knife is designed for anyway. This went WAY off-topic, even for us, didn't it? ^_^;;

Shouldn't $60 in 20s be enough? I know you carry pocket knives, but why carry so much cash on you? Those knives become useless if you lose that wallet somehow. :mellow: I dislike using my bank card for purchases, and there's very few options for banks in my area, so keeping a good chunk of change on hand's a good idea to avoid surcharges. Also, how do the knives get useless without a wallet? I'd figure that their purpose (utility, and "OH S#$@ MOVE!!!" fights/situations) doesn't need the wallet there as well. However, since it is a CHAIN wallet, there's probably some things that can be done with that in a pinch too. Heh. ^_^;;

Let's see.... When I go out and about, I have my iPhone and a wallet with a couple hundred in $20s in my right pocket, and spare change and two pocket knives in my left. That's about it.

So long as there are [wagon] on this planet, not really. At least, the fight's being brought to THEIR doorstep, not ours. ;) Of course it's big. This is /b/ that we're talking about, and perhaps the rest of the chans as well for good measure. What did you expect, a stern letter?

HELL no. However, legalization would mean that people are more willing to come out with having this problem, and get help. The fact that it would tear HUGE chunks of money from the cartels (especially mary jane, not even sure why that one's illegal today) is also another thing to consider.

True, but putting the number of personal details online for everyone to see that this would require would open up a can of worms bigger than anything that trolls could come up with.

You guys got absinthe, should be enough. ;) Seriously, though, don't ban it. Yes, it will f!@# you up. Yes, it's basically a heart attack in a can. However, just because some people have rough reactions with it doesn't mean it should be banned altogether. Just grow some common sense, and stay away from this crap if you don't like it. And for the record, most drugs people talk about (excluding heroin, meth, etc.) should be legal; take the cash from the cartels, and that can basically end our whole southern border problem in one shot.

To be honest, I'm amazed it took this long for Godwin to make an appearance in this thread. Good job, tip.it! :thumbsup: Well, I think they made a lot better arguments than mine, and with less outside links too. I'd like to hear your rebuttals.

Danqa, I'd like you (and anyone else who doesn't like internet anonymity) to read the cracked article I posted on the first page. Read it thoroughly, and perhaps some of the comments on it too. Then, come back and give me your counterpoints to the ones in the article. This should clean this debate up nicely.

Cracked done an article on this a while back.... Ah, here it is. http://www.cracked.com/article_18661_the-end-online-anonymity-why-will-you-be-freaking-out.html For those of you new to this particular site, cracked.com uses... COLORFUL language. Consider yourself warned.

Alright. Screamers need to be tagged appropriately from now on, okay? If not, I'll report every one I find until they are. Any of you heard of the Slender Man? It's a creation from the Something Awful forums, but it's still freaky as all Hell. I'm in the middle of something, so I can't go rooting around the internet for a pic, but they should be easy to find. Also, http://soupandbutter.deviantart.com/gallery/ SOME of the pics are NSFW, but they're not visible from the thumbnail pics.

Well, this looks as good a place as any. That link has a deviantart link to a.... gallery of a certain artist's rendition of a handful of the original 151. Don't go to it unless if you're ready. Every single one of these looks like they'll eat your soul through the monitor. Also, as a bit of an aside, am I the only one who thinks this guy's Lickitung looks like the Adjudicator?

.... Just for the sake of argument, HOW specifically is all religion evil? Discount the fringe lunatics of each group (WBC, KKK, Al Qaeda, Taliban, etc.) and give it to me. From my (albeit jaded, but obviously you're not much better) viewpoint, religion in and of itself is a good thing. It sets down a moral code, it can bring people together (racial diversity of Christians is an example), and it tends to help keep people in high spirits. Knowing that there's a purpose to what they're doing rather than greed/self-satisfaction is very motivating for a lot of people. Also, please don't attack me or other people for our beliefs. While other religious folk (misguided, usually by misinterpretation of their religion or just plain ignorance) are certainly not innocent of this, we try to not go out of our way to personally attack the other side. Please extend the same courtesy, if you want any sort of real debate on this topic.

You need to draw a distinction between normal, law-abiding, reasonable people and the fringe lunatics of a group. You get any group big enough, you will find people who abuse it for evil purposes. The thing separating religions from cults by popular definition is this: religions don't want to brainwash or hurt innocent people, but cults do. Scientology is a group of fringe lunatics by its basest levels. Just because someone doesn't think that everything ends when we physically die isn't a good reason to label someone as a screwball. When you try, it makes your position look worse. And yes, religious folks have been guilty of this too.

When you got hundreds of thousands of random-ass dudes doing it at the same time, it'll mess up ANYBODY's day. While I'm not a big fan of piracy in the first place, what the record companies do is not any better. They pump out this overpriced [cabbage] (Lady Gaga, Ke$sha, most rap artists, N-SYNC and their clones, Beiber, etc.) and expect people to want to pay $20 USD a pop for it? Screw you, and get your ears checked. I don't agree with 4chan very often, but on THIS particular issue, well...... Anyone got a spare Guy Fawkes mask?

Here's the question though; how useful are gun ban laws when criminals can still get guns illegally (sometimes even easier than the legal route)? Also, I'd like to see statistics comparing crime rates and the results of them before and after gun bans, if possible. My hypothesis; with law-abiding citizens turning in their firearms and criminals having less access to weapons (though still a fair number, remember the black market), we'd see a minor to moderate drop in the number of violent crimes but a higher mortality rate of the same. Reason? Fewer jackasses can get their paws on firearms, but the ones that do have little to no mentionable opposition. Personally, the best option would be to 1) institute a firearm safety course of some kind into public school (teaching people what it is, how it's relevant to society, not to stick things in the barrel while not cleared, things like that) so that people know how they are to be used, and 2) crackdown and purging of the black market. A LOT of criminals are repeat offenders; if they don't have access to a near-inexhaustible supply of weapons and ammo whenever they want, then they're going to be finding it very hard to operate (assuming that 1 is implemented, or at least the norm is kept). I'll listen to any real solutions you may have, and provide commentary on them as they come up.

Whether the people behind the Park51 have ill will or not is immaterial. They are pissing off people left and right. Surely someone interested in a community center would be more in tune with public sensibilities and find a more appropriate location. And, BTW, this "community center" will have prayer space for upwards of 2000 people. And also, BTW, the official website for the project only within the past month changed the nomenclature to "prayer space" from "mosque." You can still find the old version of the site in Google's cache. It's not a COMMUNITY CENTER - it's a MOSQUE. Why is this pissing people off? Give me precise reasons. And before you say it, the 9/11 attacks aren't an excuse because blaming the entirety of Islam for that is being ignorant of Islam. Also, if you're going to make the argument that this was made to make people mad, then you have to assume that it was made with ill will in mind. In a building that's designed to be New York City size in any respect, it is FAR from difficult to make something able to support that many people. Another aspect to remember is that this also does double duty in relieving pressure on a nearby mosque that's been having space problems for a while (if memory serves, I'll retract this if it's wrong). Making one section of the building a mosque is comparable to making one section of a YMCA a church; it's to be expected, considering that it was made by a religious group. Sees_all, I am not an expert on the Qu'ran, but if some Youtube-fu is exercised, I'm fairly certain that multiple videos of different experts and scholars on it will be able to do just that. There are ways of taking any text out of context, even these ones.

Sat; I remember hearing that he said that he called it off in response to the Muslim Community Center a couple blocks from ground zero closing its building plans. When the people rectified that this deal was never even mentioned, let alone cleared, he started his [cabbage] right back up again. I can go look for a specific link if you want, but I'm pretty sure I saw it on CNN's web site. If it ain't there, I'll do a more concerted search. Kafei; There's a difference between making a Muslim COMMUNITY CENTER a couple blocks away with no ill will in it (innocent until proven guilty, and the dudes running it are FAR from any government watch lists), which is to be honest made to promote understanding of the religion of Islam and try to improve the community (hence the term "community center"), and doing something designed to antagonize and generally piss off over a billion people on this planet for no good reason. And no, the terrorists claiming to be Muslim is not a valid excuse; would you compare the entirety of Christianity to jackasses like the Westboro Baptist Church?

Its awful that grocery stores charge money for food that keeps you alive... It's a little different. I just find it upsetting that you can need to go to a hospital because you've been in an accident, and you can't be treated because you can't afford it. Hospitals treat any emergency ailments regardless of ability to pay - if you get in a car crash they will still fix you up. True. However, if you don't have the money to pay for the astronomical bill that you're going to get, then you can be rendered bankrupt pretty quick. And no, insurance doesn't help THAT much. Keep in mind how much they're wanting to fight you on this; they are a business, they're in it for pure profit. And therein lies part of my whole problem with capitalizing health care; this can literally mean the life or death of thousands, if not millions of people in a given week. Why should greed be allowed to play any part in something like this?

Agreed with a few of the other posters here. Give us a few sample problems from your texts you can't make heads or tails of, and we'll walk you through them. We probably got enough dudes here to give you multiple ways of solving the problem, just pick the routine that looks easiest to you.

That's a problem I have. I get too stressed out when I don't get something. And I just got into high school, so now I'm getting credits, which raises the importance level of school to a whole new standard. I'm afraid I'll fail math. It's funny though, I'm taking an advanced history course meant for high-level sophomores and I'm doing fine in that. But I'm struggling with this. I'm a very good number cruncher, myself. What problems are you having specifically? A large portion of the more advanced math is just knowing the formula and where everything goes, and of course doing things in the right order. If necessary, I can walk you through ways to solve problems that you give me. Another big portion of how successful you are with math; keeping track of everything. I think the list of people who can actually do things in their head without writing down anything is extremely small; record every little step you take to get to something, no matter how small; this will help you with doing things in proper order, too.

Well, part of their entire recruitment drive is that if they die for their cause, they go to heaven with a harem waiting for them, so anything's on the table. Yeah, the chances that one of these idiots will get ANYTHING shot off is somewhere in the range of very little to Wile E. Coyote getting the roadrunner. That don't mean that these guys won't try something. Keep on your toes. Yes, there is a chance that the Community Center is going to be used by the people who made it as a "Ha Ha Screw You America!!!" monument. However, there's also a chance that any new Wal-Mart will use illegal immigrants for employees. There's also a chance that the newest church in town is going to be a Neo-Nazi boot camp. There is a chance for anything on this planet to be used for bad things. Do we watch for them? Sure, that's called being smart. Do we stop something on a "maybe"? Not only is that entirely un-American (innocent until proven guilty is pretty baseline, here), but it gives the people we're trying to fight just more ammunition to use to recruit people (IE: "Hey look, these American bastards want war on all Islam! We need to fight back before they kill us all!"). Do we REALLY want to alienate the second-largest religion on the planet for what amounts to [cabbage]?

Another solution would be using centrifugal force to simulate gravity. For all the non-egg heads reading this, this means using the force that keeps water in a bucket from falling out when you swing it around hard enough to mimic the pull of gravity. Considering that friction in space is basically zero, as long as you can get this started up proper (and stop, of course), there shouldn't be any problems with using this little loophole. Personally, if we want to do any sort of space exploration at all, we need to start working on getting to and from the moon in large scale. I'm not talking about the ISS, I'm thinking full-on colonization. This would also be a perfect chance to test out all the simulated-gravity ideas without having to worry about it sending the poor SOBs in there off into the void. Also, as we learn how to get better at sending things in and out of our atmosphere, that lends itself to improving things such as fuel economy, shielding, and space inside the ship. ALL of these will help make space travel a lot less of a painful experience. It'd also be good practice for when we get to a different planet that actually has an atmosphere we can live in.

Actually, if memory serves, they DO have documented proof of black holes. Not sure exactly where, but I remember seeing it get referenced in Discovery magazine I think. I think we need to do one of two things to be able to solve the FTL travel problem. Either work on finding ways to do long distance teleportation (maybe through 5th-dimensional manufactured tesseracts?) or work on ways to augment how the laws of physics apply to the craft (not sure on this one, but I'm not at NASA). Either way, as long as we can get to somewhere like the Asteroid Belt with no problem, we're good for the next couple thousand years on building materials. Work on recycling older stuff and we should be set.

The faster you go through space, the slower you go through time. For example, if someone was to go the speed of light (186,000 Miles per second or 5,865,696,000,000 miles per year) for one year they would have actually moved 1000 years in our time. This still means though it would take them 127 years to get there, but for us it would be 127,000 years. They would have to be like robot human hybrids or something. And then then more then likely the companies that sent them to being with would be no longer around. [/geek] Right.... I thought it worked the other way, though, that time sped up for us, and slowed down for them. But you're probally right, i don't know much about it :lol: Ill post this one thought and then stop it's going off topic lol. The speed of light is relative to the observer. The speed of light is always 186,000 MPS. So if it's relative then that means something has to change in the fabric of the universe know as space-time. What changes is time. Time slows down for people going faster then others. The change in time is so small in our daily lives we can not see it. But someone going the speed of light would age one year to our 1000 years. [/ubergeek] I remember hearing about this. However, I got one question. As it applies to space travel, would this mean that the dude in the rocket would only perceive (and age) one year when his rocket has been going for a thousand years, or is it something else? If so, that could actually be kinda useful for this sort of thing. Not exactly a good thing to think about, but still. I've always been interested in off-world science, especially astronomy. I've also always wondered what would happen if we were to start finding signals from a relatively close planet kinda similar to what we were sending out a few decades ago. Assuming that we could decode them, it'd basically be able to give us a play-by-play on their culture, what they operate by day to day, and what the political situation for them would be like. First question is obvious: do we try and contact them, or wait and see what happens? Depending on how well we can do this sort of thing, we might even be able to get picture information, so finding out what they look like is also entirely possible.