Posts by EnderX

Exactly what makes it obvious that this is so? It would seem counterintuitive to me.

A) You're not repressing human nature, you're numbing it. The real thing is still under there.

B) The instant you run into someone who doesn't react the normal way to your nice little Brainwasher's Delight cocktail, your plan goes out the window. If you're fortunate(from your perspective, not mine), the reaction will be anaphylactic and you'll simply kill the poor victim. Otherwise, you'll end up with people who are incapable of being so repressed...at which point the revolution will begin to take form again.

And all of that is assuming you can actually get every single person to take the drug cocktail in the first place, which I find highly unlikely on the grounds that individualism is also a part of human nature (if not always fully grown in practice) and many people would refuse to allow you to drug them; enforced drugging would lead others to turn against you, and once more, we're back at the revolution.

Lol. Did you know that SE england is sinking and NW scotland is rising?

How cool is that...

So, any plans to gather a bunch of men together, saw the place in half, and turn the sinking end around and reattach it to the other one?

I think thats known as plate tectonics =p

I was referring to moving the equator, not to moving the Atlanta region.

Except that that particular event will never happen in this world.

Supporting, yes. Regulating, no. And given that the government usually isn't a true pure democracy (where everyone [in theory] gets to decide things as a group), then eventually the subset of 'the masses' which makes up 'the government' will end up regulating others for the sheer sake of the power to do so, no matter what alternative motives they profess. They may even believe they're doing it for their stated motives, but at its core it boils down, largely, to 'power tripping'. It's simply human nature. And you might be able to repress it for a while in some people, but you won't be able to do so for everybody, nor will you be able to do so for very long with anybody. It's an inherent part of who and what we are.

communism does not have to be totalitarian by nature, it is quite possible to have a democratic communists society.(fascist are racists communists are not)

I found a quote a while back from someone which rebutes that statement. I'll post it when I get a chance to look at it again.

Please also allow me to say that, in the course of human history, I can only think of one community that appears to have abided by the idealized socialistic point of view. (And it is my suspicion that they would not be acknowleged as 'legitimate' socialists.) Every other time it has occured, human nature has tended to cause the society to self-destruct.

The nuclear bomb has also been considered as a political move to prevent the Russians from invading Japan, both to show the power of the US and to end the war before the Russians had a chance to get involved on that side. That way the US was able to build Japan into the capitalist nation it has come to be, without worrying about Russian communism during the reconstruction. I've not researched the theory myself, but it does make a lot of sense given the following 30 years of the Cold War against communism.

I do not know about political considerations involved in this; I haven't heard of such before. What I've always heard was that the bloodprice (X# Japanese killed) of using the bomb(s) was weighed against the bloodprice (Y# Japanese killed + Z# 'Allied' killed) of attempting a direct invasion and the end choice was to use the bombs. Considering that Franklin Roosevelt seemed to be perfectly happy giving pretty much everything else away at Yalta, I doubt he'd have had too many qualms about doing so with Japan, and Truman was following in FDR's footsteps. (Side note: After Winston Churchill's famous 'Iron Curtain' speech, Truman apparently invited Stalin to the US to give a rebuttal.)

ah, yes. I forgot that aspect of it as well. Pretty much the end of ww2 started the cold war. And the nuke was what made the U.S. emerge from the war as a world power... The soviets were right on our …

huh? airtight set? lol.. did you even look at the video? All they would need is a studio and some cheap imitation spacecrafts.. you obviously haven't seen many scifi movies.. They could have very easily faked it. I'm not saying that they did or didn't. But It is very probable that the first lunar landing was a fraud.. We have probably landed on the money by now anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

Terra has an atmosphere. It is composed mostly of Nitrogen, with a large secondary body of oxygen and other trace materials.

Luna does not have an atmosphere. On the lunar surface, any object not encased within some kind of protective barrier is exposed to vacuum.

It is possible, in limited amounts, to generate a vacuum chamber (totally devoid of any form of atmosphere) on earth. After doing so, any objects present within the chamber will exhibit certain characteristics associated with the nature of vacuum. The most commonly-used example is the feather/ball falling scenario; in a vacuum, the two will fall at the same rate, as there is no air resistance to slow the feather down.

Objects within the original lunar footage display characteristics demonstrated by objects in a vacuum, not objects in an atmosphere. The motion of dust and dirt, for example, is not enhanced by air currents as it would be on earth.

In order to have faked those scenes, even leaving aside all problems but this one, NASA would have had …

No, then it'd simply be part of the Arctic. It's still going to be north of the equator...unless you're proposing to move that, as well as freezing everyone?

I ok thanks, just for clarafication a democrat is like a socialist but not as extreme and a republican is a capitalist thats not that extreme either(even though alot of democrats and republicans are really communists/socialists and capitalists/fascists respectively, they just do not want to be labeled "radical") Oh and Im a communist.

Sorry, Sturm, but from what I understand, Facism is just as much a totalitarian format as Communism is. Both of them would be leftward-marching from my pov.

cortex

ore

I know.. really.. wtf? I wonder if we will ever know for sure.. We were too competitive during the cold war

You'd prefer it the other way around, where we just sat back until the Soviets came for us?

Ur

aspic

Lol interesting.
Do you believe aliens exist?

Of course! Just look, they're always sneaking across the border and

...

oh, wait. You meant the other kind, huh?

haha.. I was just joking.. I'm a realist.. So I've got to say that no, I do not believe we have made any contact with other life forms. However, there are probably other life forms out there... The universe is HUGE!

Also, I don't know what your religious views about this are.. but I think aliens would by contrary to Christianity (to some extent). Well, the bible never mentions anything about aliens. And why would god creat other species when humans are his perfect creation?

In regards to this:
As I've said elsewhere, I am a christian. Based on what I understand from the scriptures, I do not believe we will ever run into intelligent extraterrestrial life, no. I am willing to accept the idea that there might be non-intelligent life out there somewhere, though.

As to your last line about creating other species, if that were true, then why do we have everything from aardvarks to zebras on this planet?

It is hard to say whether or not the moon landing was faked, the blowing flag is too convincing tho.

Which blowing flag? The one where it was rocking a bit, or the one where they didn't manage to get the boom arm extended enough to stretch it all the way? http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html#flag

Um, not to sound like an idiot (or a jerk), but how exactly does one give negative rep? Whenever I click on someone's 'add to [name] reputation] in a thread, I get a screen with a single, checked radio button saying 'I approve' and a comment box. Given that there doesn't seem to be any way to disapprove(can't uncheck the button, after all)...am I just cluelessly missing something here that should be blindingly obvious?

spice

Okay, population I can see, but obviously haven't been keeping up with the Food Supply issue. I thought we'd been doing better at yield-per-acre; is this not true? Or are we dealing with another FDR-style scenario regarding food?

Of course such things are years into the future.. perhaps even well after our deaths

Perhaps not so much of a problem...some of the things I've read regarding time travel seem to imply it could become possible at superluminal speeds, so if that's accurate then they can just come back and bring the stuff with them, right?

raise

I think the 'remotely affordable' value might be usefully plugged into the 'Canada/Russia' equation as well. Less of a problem than Mars or Luna, less even than Antarctica (where we do have some inhabitants), but still difficult to provide supplies and difficult for the settlers (yeah, you read that correctly) to provide for themselves. Doing either (shipping in supplies or doing whatever needs to be done to get viable cropland) would quickly raise the price of living in such areas.

I would submit that such areas are 'unihabitable' under the conditions of time and finance. Not that they absolutely cannot be inhabited, but that it's a generally losing proposition, so why bother?

I don't even understand the last negative rep.. How would someone know I bed repped them ? lol.. I don't usually bad rep people anyways..

Simple, the directional signal amplifier in the tinfoil hat picked up the brief click as your mouse followed the 'rep' link, and they watched through their tiny satellite eyes as you typed in something nasty.

Or in other words, sheer paranoia.

spirit

You double posted, dude. I get thiose ones too. The link says ebay but if you hover over it it is an ip adress with a web server set up to look like ebay. I get the ones allegedly ftom my bank too (which is wierd considering i dont believe in banks and dont have an account.....) :)

I assure you, they do exist.

weakened

Ook? Eek ah ahk!

weeder

Are we allowed to add our own captions for that picture, even though it's already got one?

reader

I didn't know all that. But you said the FF Legends series were more closely related to Squaresoft/square enix etc. Isn't final fantasy series still made by squaresoft/square enix? I keep getting these gaming magazines in the mail, even though I never signed up for any of them, and I remember seeing something about a chocobo racing game in it. Maybe I'm wrong. I thought the first few final fantasies were really old for nintendo or something. They made it for gameboy?

yeah, GBA.

Squaresoft released a set of games known (in general, at least) as the SaGa series. The most well-known (in the USA) of these games will probably SaGa Frontier and SaGa Frontier 2, which were released for the Playstation, and were the first SaGa games published under the SaGa name in the United States. I don't know about anywhere else on that.

Yes, Square(soft/Enix) also published the Final Fantasy games. That's kind of the point. The three Legends games (Final Fantasy Legends, Final Fantasy Legends 2, and Final Fantasy Legends 3) owe most of their gameplay to the SaGa series of games; the only connections they actually seem to have with the Final Fantasy series proper is that they're rpgs that were made by Square. These three games were released in the early/mid 1990s, for the original Gameboy portable gaming system. They were marketed under the Final Fantasy name in the US because that name was at least semi-well known, whereas the SaGa name was not. …

holy

I'm kind of curious. Is there a reason for resurrecting so many ancient topics (most of them appear to have been started in 2002, for example), or is The Dude (Usually most recent poster) just having some fun?

folly

Recursive quote()?

Recursive quote()?

Recursive quote()?

Recursive quote?

elderly

@joshSCH: I'm not referring to money (printed or minted), I'm referring to wealth; purchasing power. Or perhaps if you prefer, bartering power, with the printed/minted items merely being a special substance bartered for/with. If the skills and/or talents (including intelligence) that you have are in desire, and you hone them to keep them functioning, rather than allowing them to sit idle or decay, you increase your own value in such a system. In terms of your bartering ability (with, again, physical currency merely being another item bartered for) you have become wealthier. You are now worth more than you were before.

Are you allowed to prefer your own posts, or does that count as bragging?

I think part of what we're trying to prove is that people can argue about pretty much anything if they set their minds to it.

feather

Um, It's not like he all of a sudden became Christian right before announcing his presidential candidacy. He never truly was a muslim anyways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama (Theres some evidence for you, walt;))

Obama apparently became Christian in his twenties.. So why do you consider him muslim? Are people not allowed to convert from one religion to another? I was born christian, but now I am atheist.. Do you still consider me a christian?

Well, according to some religions, no, you can't convert from one to another. (Or more precisely, you can't convert from that religion to another one.) I don't happen to buy that, but it's still part of their structure.

And no, I wouldn't consider you a christian. I would state that you probably never were a christian; choosing to follow Jesus Christ is a personal decision; it's not something you can be born into. I am a christian. I am so because I weighed the evidence I've seen, and chose to follow Him myself, not because my parents were, or my grandparents, or any other relative or friend. That my family and friends mostly are believers has certainly made it easier for me (as opposed to being killed for following Christ, as many believers are in Islamic countries, or in places like China), but they were not the ones that lead me to make that decision in the first place.

Economics isn't a zero-sum game either. Wealth, unlike matter or energy, can be created and destroyed, not merely shuffled around. The idea that wealth is a zero-sum gamef is the one that lies behind traditional socialist thinking.

And no, everyone can't be rich, because 'rich' is a relative term. Unless you'd like to put a specific value on it, either a unique static value relative to some year's dollar value (1986, for example) or perhaps as a constant percentage of the local GNP or GDP? Still, it's quite possible for others to become affluent without you going down, or for you to become affluent without them going down. Trade, commerce, tech, etc, all of these can have an effect. Consider it this way: Due to enhanced commerce, you personally probably have a higher buying power as an individual than most noblemen did back in the middle ages, simply because it's so much less expensive for something to get from point a to your doorstep. Due to enhanced tech, you can keep tabs on what goods and services are thereby available, without having to keep an entire office full of economists or traders directly in your employ. From what you've said, then by the standards of the middle ages, you're rich. By those standards, so am I, and so probably are most if not all of the people at Daniweb. Yet you define yourself as not being rich...and by the standards of this time, you are correct, no doubt. (It's …

easter

A society may become just as easily deluded as an individual. Just because it is commonly held that something is true, or is false, is not the proof that it is so.

1. If you can find someone else you can trick into supporting you in your desires to live the life you want while you're young, go right ahead. But unless they're unnaturally generous and/or altruistic (unnatural because humankind as a whole is a selfish bunch) you'll have to trick them or somehow coerce them; without that unnatural generosity, there's really no reason for them to support you at the expense of themselves, which is, at least in the world we live in, kind of a requirement of the situation at hand. Again, though, if you can find someone that generous, by all means, take the chance.

2. Commercial exploitation is the definition of your ant colony, is it not? I say that human civilization is beyond that. And you are correct that we are quickly running toward ant-like totality in much of society. Where we disagree is that you seem to have claimed this as a form of civilization, whereas I see it as the decivilizing of our world. Iff I have mistaken your point of view, I apologize and ask for forgiveness and correction. "Teach me, and I will hold my tongue: and cause me to understand wherein I have erred."

3a. I asked specifically about a decision defined as being between the two of us. I would see it as wrong if you were to kill me, of course. However, I would also see it as wrong for me to kill you. The only case I …

In that case isn't she no longer valid? Amendment 22 of the US Constitution:

1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President, when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Anyway, since she wasn't ruling in her own name during the last shot, she's probably legally covered. Although there was so much talk about a copresidency under the Clintons last time...wonder if she could be disqualified on those grounds?

You're missing my point. Collective Gatherings, even for the purpose of keeping the totality alive, are. not. Civilization. The things which make Civilization require the presence of that spark of greatness inside humankind that you apparently wish to deny even exists. Ants do not provide an example of Civilization or even Barbarian-level culture (which in itself contains some admirable traits). As you pointed out, they provide nothing but the totality, the hive mind or collective intelligence. Civilization does not rest on a single individual of whom all others are mere extensions, it relies upon the differences between individuals.

And I will say that you are wrong (absolutely) in assessing right and wrong as nothing but imaginary, relative constructs of humankind. Or are you saying that there might be some condition under which it would be right for you, as you are now, to kill me, as I am now, or vice versa?

Right and wrong form the foundations of our civilization and any culture developing off of it. To attempt to run a culture of any sort without them would lead to pure chaos.

As to Greenpeace and PETA, or any other groups like them, I suppose these are the kinds of groups that'd cheer at the following legal decision. I can't remember the case name, or the year, sadly.

A brazilian monastary attempted to have termites living underneath them legally evicted. (I believe the purpose of this was to allow them to exterminate …

Perhaps, but remember, he's still got to defeat Hillary Clinton for the official nomination as the Democratic Candidate before that can happen, and the Clintons are no strangers to the kind of political wrangling that go on in those contests.

1. Yes you are, whether you like it or not.

2. "We can reason, animals can't" - says who? You just can't UNDERSTAND animals. If you think that the humans are the smartest animals on the planet, then I say by what standards?

Brains size? Dolphins have same size brains. Whales have 5 times bigger brains, and people eating them.

Civilization and order? Think ants.

Only thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is speech and disposable thumbs. All other goodies came from those two things: tools, weapons, machinery, gadgets, written words, teaching, science...

Brain size has nothing to do with intelligence, even among human beings. (I vaguely recall hearing that the largest, mass-wise, brain so far found was in an imbecile. [Their choice of descriptor])

But in reference to your argument, even assuming we did accept brain size as an indicator of intelligence, brain size relative to what? Last I checked, dolphins massed a fair amount more than humans, so their brains are, relative to the size of their bodies, smaller than those of human beings. And given the mass of the average whale, I'm willing to bet that most of them would qualify as having a fair amount larger body-to-brain ratio than humankind does, as well.

Regarding your reference to Civilization and Order being represented in ants: Order, yes. The order of the hive, of the totality. Ant's are actually a pretty good example of how a utopian totalitarianism would work; everyone …

esteem