BlueTear

No other game has ever managed to produce the adrenaline rush I felt the first time we killed Nefarian. There really is no gaming experience quite like the one Blizzard managed to add to high end raiding. Altering tactics, analyzing what can be improved and how to improve it... Watching the individual cogs made up by the various classes interact to do handle an encounter... WoW is, simply put, a much better game.

Read what Uldric said please. Invest the money, get more money, use more money to help people. I'd go with that as well. Well... I make no claim to be a financial expert, but... How much interest would one pay on a 10 million dollar loan, anyway?

Several people in this thread have told stories of private schools that are below the standards set by public schools. Assuming that 'private' actually means better education is... not very accurate. And then there's the whole extra subjects thing, most notable various religious practices. I mean, I don't mind of some parents send their kids of to a school that only serves kosher food, adapts it holidays around religious holidays and so on, but the idea of parents sending their kids off to a school where they are taught to worship a specific diety along with maths, or indoctrinated by a political party, scares the [cabbage] out of me.

Call me anti-social, but the way I always wanted my secret room - the entire back wall of the bottom floor of our house is against the ground so to speak - is big enough to stay in, close the door, then just sit there with a good book (and a computer with internet access. If I ever get enough money to do something like this, I'd build it big enough to contain some household servers) until I felt like reemerging into the world again.

In my opinion, there's only two ways to make those things worth it: 1) You build the secret room below your house. The image of a revolving stair is an excellent example, causing the room to end up on your basement. Which you don't have. No, the house does most empathically not have a basement. You don't see a basement door do you? 2) You have a... what are they called in english.... souterrain house? Both floors on the ground level because the house is built in a slope? And then you sort of make a back room into the ground. Depending on where the house is, this kind of secret room would be completely undetectable from anywhere else, yet be able to be quite large. My personal favourite way of making a secret room.

Because his punishment is a stimuli to everyone else who lives in the society; Both as a deterant for others and to remove him from society to reduce the level of influence he can have on other individuals. He's not being punished for his own sake, he's being punished for the rest of us. The fact that he had no choice is irrelevant; His punishment serves as stimuli to illicit the desired response in other people. It's more of a reflection of your basic ethical beliefs really. You see a man being punished for something in which he had no choice, I see social engineering where an individual is sacrificed for the good of everyone else. As for probabilities and quantum mechanics, I'm curious... Are "random thoughts" the workings of random - defined as truly random, like the decay of a radioactive isotope random - ion, or the result of subconscious thoughts? Personally, I don't believe individual particles are able to create thoughts, because thoughts are patterns of bioelectrical energy. Randomly firing neurons, whether they can be actively predicted or not, do not - in my opinion - create thoughts. Besides which, unless you go into the subatomic layer where knowing the state of the quanta irreversibly alters the state of said quanta, the fact that we have no mesurement for identifying the place of those calcium ions, is not the same as the calcium ions position being "random". Or rather, that they could not be included in a deterministic equation that would predict the response to a given stimuli. But as I said, for all practical intents and purposes, determinism on the scale in just a single creature requires more computing power than we have and more background information than we are able to obtain. For all practical intents and purposes, we might as well be said to have a free will.

And I'll argue that said response, no matter how unique the stimuli is, will always be based on person responding. Taking a being and exposing it to a new and unique situation cannot illicit a response that is not based on a framework of past experiences, genetics and current chemical state of the body. When a child is born, it does not scream because of the nature of the stimuli, it screams because the stimuli illicits an insitictive, genetically based, response. In theory, yes, it's possible to expose an individual to a situation so beyond the scope of its framework that the response is unpredictable. In practice, the being would have to be lacking a chemical state, a genetic structure and a physical body to lack a framework that could not, would not, be used as a basis for the response. No, we chose the path most appealing to us, not advantageous. In a lot of situations the two are the same, but there's still a distinction. And what we find appealing is decided by, once again, genetics, past experiences and chemicals. Of course it is who they are, and the only reason it's percieved as out of character is because it's physically impossible for us to know another person fully. Simply put, we're not equipped to know everything there is to know, and our definitions of another's character is based on our observations on their behaviour. Which is merely a tip of the iceberg shaped by ever single experience and private - conscious or unconscious - thought the person has ever had, whether we are there to observe it or not. And as for a practical use... We lack the capabilities to overcome determinism. We don't have the computing power, nor the ability to extract the neccesary information required to simulate a person. Simply put, there's no point in living your life by determinism because you will never know yourself or others enough. For all practical purposes, you might as well life as if you had a free will. Even if it's only an illusion brought on by our lack of abilities.

As much as I'd like to believ in free will, I always end up thinking like this: If I had a computer with, hm, a lot of computing power and entered everything about a given person. Not just their conscious thoughts and ideas, but their entire subconscious, every single experience they'd ever had, every thought whether they could consciously remember them or not. And then enter the chemical state of the body throughout the individuals development ever since, say, conception. Wouldn't that computer be able to accurately predict the response of said individual to any given stimuli? In a way, it manages to tie in to some reflections I've had about God. Surely the omnipotent being that willed the universe into existance would have enough of this "computing power" to keep track of the entire universe at once. Every sub-atomic particle. Granted, at that level, the state of the particle becomes a rather elusive concept, but you should still be able to do probability calculations of it. Probability calculations on a scale that would use computing power beyond our imagination, but still.

I don't really have a favourite type of meat, I'm more of an omnivore. Well, kinda. I think every single kind of meat can be prepared in a way that makes it appetizing. I have no problem whatsoever when it comes to fish and seafood, some of the best dishes I've ever eaten involvs a fair bit of fish. I do set my limits near bodyparts that aren't meat. I think I could eat goose liver, I know I'd have no problem with fried grasshoppers, but no way am I ever going to taste ape brain or the likes. Haggis gives me the creeps. (... now I'm really hungry)

Yes Lionheart, those. And those pictures are an excellent illustration of why as well; On one hand we two neatly arranged crÃÆÃâÃâèpes, fried just so hard you can still roll it into a burrito wth strawberries and ice-cream inside without breaking it. On the other hand, we have a mountain of... well... it's glistening. The only food I intentionally prepare in a manner that makes it glisten is bacon, and certain sausages.ÃÆââ¬Å¡Ãâô (... I'm hungry now)

The goal of education in a democratic society, apart from providing a framework to build further studies on and teaching children how to survive in todays society (let's face it... most of us live in socities where being illiterate would be like being handicapped), is to teach us to be good citizens in said society. In my opinion, this bit of education is often overlooked, even though it's - IMHO anyway - a lot more important to learn than some of the elementary school algebra. I don't think you can have a society that is truly democratic unless time and effort is spent using education to raise the next generation to be tolerant, excercise critical thinking and careful analysis. Teach them the importance of voting. Expose them to culture in forms they'd never see at home. Open their minds and broaden their views.

Pancakes, but not those huge monstrosities you encounter abroad, but the thin cr̮̬̉̉pe-like ones we refer to as pancakes in Sweden. I lol'ed.

The primary reason why Mars is favoured over something like the moon is its size, the moon just isn't big enough to maintain any semblance of an atmosphere (and any issues with UV rays experienced on Mars, that has at least some atmosphere, is going to be a lot worse on the moon, which for all practical purposes has none). The only real advantage the moon has is its proximity to Earth. And water and water we can actually drink are two separate things. A higher coastline is no guarantee for a continious, sufficient, supply of fresh water.

How is creationism science, and where is the factual evidence for it? (And strictly speaking, looking at different religions, though their creation stories are similiar, they're hardly the same. What invalidates Hindu creationism?)

Pretty enough as far as words come, but does that sentence actually mean anything? For starters, what is "the scientific method"? I don't believe religion has any place in any kind of education except as a tool to understanding our history and our cultures, both past and present. I also believe any democratic society that permits the systemized religiously based education is shooting itself in the foot. A democratic state that allows its youth to be raised to believe rather than understand is in for a world of trouble.

First of all, I don't think drinking culture is directly coorelated with legalized drinking. Taking away a ban is not going to make people binge drink less, because it's not going to change people's attitudes. Second of all, alcholo not being life threatening? Huh?

I'd say that's your answer right there. (The force from the coil on the block is first +, then 0 at the equilibrium, then - once it has past the equilibrium. The friction remains a - force throughout the entire movement, but it's actual size depends on the velocity of the block, which depends on the time and acceleration, and the acceleration depends on the distance to the equilibrium...)

While I'd hardly describe a fertilized cell as a DNA error, I'd like to point out that erroneous DNA can replicate itself and grow just the regular kind; we call it cancer. DNA encoding errors continues to grow despite being encoding errors. I'm also kind of curious as to how the statement about DNA being a basis for human identity connects to twins. After all, they're hardly the same being?

Digestive tracts; Whatever. Not relevant. Cow's farts are, around here anyway, known for their content of methane - a greenhouse gas - which leads to a series of jokes about global warming and cow farts. Thus, I presumed you were refering to methane rather than CO2. Tundra; Because the methane is frozen into the tundra. Picture cube of ice of lemonade. The "lemonade particles" havn't frozen, the H20 in it has. When the ice melts, the particles frozen into it is released. Apply on a much, much bigger scale, and we have - for example - Siberia. Examples of articles about the subject can be found here and there, for example here and here. As for the billions of years of Earth's existance; If anything, it's an argument in favour of cutting back on the release of greenhouse gases. Scientists estimate that 2.7 billion years ago the mean temperature was somewhere around 70 degree celsius. Why? Greenhouse gases that are today bound in various forms such, oceans, biological life, seabeds, mountains etcetc. It is most empathically not in our best interest to play around with the atmosphere until we reach those conditions again. Even though they theoretically represent a fairly common state if you look on the earths entire geological existance.

While I don't really want to turn this into a discussion concerning digestive tracts, I think you're confusing CO2 with nitrogen. Most gases in the digestive tract are swallowed, and swallowing those concentrations of CO2 without larger traces of nitrogen - especially considering a fair portion of humanity lack the bacteria neccesary to produce methane in their intestines - strikes me as... Odd. In either case, unfreeze the tundra, release methane. Where does this whole "it happends all the time" idea come from anyway?

I'd like to point out that accessing google earth does *not* mean a satellite is redirects it's orbit to provide an optimal view of whatever it is you're looking at. It's a *database* of already taken images. So if there was a black car next to a white car on the day it was taken, the photo will continue to look like that until when/if the photo is updated, whether there happends to be two cars standing there or not...

Then again, cow's fart methane, not CO2. You know, methane, one of the primary components of natural gas?

Personally, I think you can. We didn't enter this century as a beacon of equality, we've never been first with allowing a minority to vote, heck, we even forced sterilization of gupsy's for a while, in true nazi style. But for some weird reason, the single biggest party - and most of the time, the party involved in leading the nation - has been socialistic over the past 70 years. And say what you want about socialism, but they really like their equality. And the all-public school system continues to reflect that. I'm not saying it always works out, but after having passed through 12 years of it, I can say there's some serious amounts of effort being poured into turning out democratic citizens with as few prejudices and as much equality as possible. You want change in the future, start working on the future: The children. (That being said, I didn't vote leftist in the last election. Granted, our right is probably more left than most other countries middle. Err... Yeah, think that came out right)

... could've sworn one of the more interesting things about the Siberian tundra was all the tons and tons of, as you so eloquently put it, "cow farts" frozen into it. That would, in the event of such a massive defreeze, move into the atmosphere. Now wouldn't that be, if you'll pardon the pun, hot?

Around here, it's illegal. In fact, holding the possibility of a future child against either of the parents is illegal, and it's up to the employer to prove that no action is taken on that basis, including if the person in question isn't an emploỷ̮̩̉e, but someone being interviewed for a position. I'm fairly sure even asking whether someone intends to have children during an interview for a position is threading dangerously close, if for no other reason then if you turn the person down, you're the one who ends up having to prove it wasn't for that reason. Best not to know.