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lindsaybernsen

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About lindsaybernsen

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  1. Telepathic, for sure. I would, of course, be able to tune it on or off at will (there are some times when you just DONT want to hear what other people are thinking), and communicate via an awesome mind-link as well.Flying is a close second, but without the ability to breathe at high altitudes or withstand extreme cold, it can only get you so far.HMMMMM.... as for a name... I think I would be ENIGMA.Or maybe I'll reconsider the name....
  2. Several years ago one of my friends sent me the email for Crush007. I filled it in, but I had nothing particularly secretive to hide. Still, like the others have said, its an invasion of privacy and I was angry. If you want to know your friends secrets, just be nice to them and ask when you are alone. Not a good idea for a person you like because at least the Crush website says it has sent the data and lists the email it is sent to. NOT good to let your future girlfriend know you were snooping...
  3. I met a boy 2 years ago from my school. We were on the way to District UIL with our 2 mutual friends snuggling in the bus seat in front of us, and hoping to ignore this we began to discuss Marxism and the economy. I had actually met him a few days prior in the debate room and had edited his cases, but it was only for a few minutes and I hadnt even learned his name. This was our first real conversation and, nerd that I am, I was immediately enamored. At the tournament I pulled him outside with the excuse that it was "such a nice day" and we talked for another hour and every word out of his mouth was brilliant and we couldnt stop smiling. A little later in the night I was talking with the mutual friends when he came over. We asked him to sit with us, but he looked at me with huge apologetic eyes and quickly ran off mumbling that he had to call the girl he had JUST started dating. I didnt see him until he was in my classes the next year and he almost immediately became one of my best friends. In debate and history we talked non-stop, "spreading" (speed reading/talking) about technology, philosophy and ancient civilizations. We sat right next to each other and when the teacher tried to move us apart we both complained bitterly, plotting ways to still communicate. I finally met his girlfriend, but mostly I tried to avoid her. Another boy asked me out, and he was sweet and funny so I agreed, though until that point I had been boyfriendless. About halfway through the year, only about 2 weeks after I began dating someone else, we went to another debate tournament. At all the ones prior we had walked around together, enthralled in our easy conversation. This time was not different except that our mutual attraction was fairly apparent (though after that first tournament we never flirted, we just talked as often as we could). I got cold and he ran all the way across the school to get me HIS jacket, even though mine was closer. His best friend, who was there came up to me and decided he wanted to (this is a direct quote, *gag*) be the spark that kindled the fuel he knew was already there. So, just like that, I was thrown into emotional turmoil... there was a boy I knew was more perfect than I would ever meet again who DID, in fact, like me very much, and then there was the boy who was awesome, but not perfect, that I was commited to. For his part, the boy I wanted had been on the verge of breaking up with the other girl for some weeks, since their relationship had been spiraling steadily downwards. I shouldnt have broken up with the boy I was dating, but I did, using the excuse that I it wasnt fair to him to have such a huge crush on someone else. I am a commitment person by nature, so this was a huge leap that scared me very much. A month later I was dating Him and it was exactly the way it was supposed to be. He hugged me for the first time and the world settled into the state of being completely and profoundly RIGHT for the first time in my life. His ex-girlfriend threw many temper-tantrums, and I felt horribly guilty about the boy I had hurt. I am not a drama person, but since that point my life has been full of it. Eventually she didnt hate him any more, and I told him that not only was it OK for her to be his friend but that I wanted them to be friends because the cycle of vicious hate had been tearing him apart. *************** He broke up with me in email (3 paragraphs- the last of which berated me for hating Student Council, which I supported his Presidency of, though I thought it was stupid). I died, and that is only a hair's breath from literal. I walked around for months mourning the loss of the part of myself he had become. Most of our mutual friends tried to ignore me because I didnt rant like she had, I was just unusually quiet. He didnt say why, but when I asked later he cited family issues and inability to commit. **************** It used to be a long-standing joke that I hate being in pictures and am not very photogenic though photography is one of his hobbies. He took a suprising amount of pictures of me at some of our events after the break-up and sent them to me saying, "look, you can look cute in pictures " While we were at two different debate camps he "just happpened" to find a reason to browse the photo page of my camp's website for other pictures of me which he also commented on. At summer school for extra credit he was in her(the ex-girlfriend) class (I had a different teacher), and I had to watch them flirt in the halls. Every time he saw me he looked away. He denied her to me, over and over again. ****************** She was in Israel at the beginning of the year, but when she came back he walked her to all of their classes. Again he denied a relationship, but a few weeks later he admitted that his mother had grounded him when she found out, mid-summer, that he was dating her again. He was elected debate President, I was Vice again. Tournaments are/were almost every weekend and we ignored each other. She decided that now, not the first time, but now, she wanted to be my friend. What she really wanted, I knew, was to keep tabs on me. After the first time, (though I didnt "steal" her boyfriend, I did end up dating him) I don't blame her. I was angry, but not horribly so. Mostly I just reconsidered all the possible connotations (with the especially nasty, "he was using you as a break from her, and didnt really care," bothering me quite a bit.) We finally had a post-breakup talk, almost a year later. He says he still has pictures of me. They were on his wall, but she saw them and went into a rage. So, he told me conspiritorily, they are now on his desk. Unlike the keepsakes he had from her which he shoved into his closet while he was dating me, he doesnt want to put the pictures away. He says its because they are good photos, and this is true. Artistically they are amazing. But, pictures are memories incarnate, and keeping them their is keeping the memory. He wanted to be friends, I wanted to also, but I dont think I can. Things begin to lighten up a little- I dont snap and say bitter things and he neglects to use his usual sarcastic comebacks. He buys me an extension of my domain name "indefinitely". It was a birthday present before but it wasnt set to expire for a month. He said it was another birthday gift. I finally started dating someone else whom I really like. He is also in debate. Watching the two of the argue makes me feel out-of-place. ***************** We went to the same tournament where his best friend set everything rolling. All I could think about the whole weekend was how I would have ignored that chemistry but once it was pulled into the open I had to discuss it. I know it went through his mind too. Throughout, he constantly calls me "the destroyer of electronics" (a reference to my inability to use our timers, the fact I dropped my cell in water, and the missing backspace key on my laptop) and uses a teasing tone and smiles. He looks in my eyes when he is talking to me, a relatively "new" transistion. He finds me when he has comments to make. He sits in the seat behind me and my new boyfriend when we are on the bus. I catch his eye too often, and he tries too hard to irritate me so that I will make a face at him. I like the boy I am dating very much, but I was head over heels for the one who broke up with me. He has been arrogant and sarcastic to me until recently, but I keep clinging to the person that I knew. He hasnt been that person for a long time, but sometimes I forget, especially when he smiles. I'm a romantic; I know it. But in real life you dont automatically forget someone because there is someone new, you just hope that the current relationship will override the old. It would be easier if he would disappear, but he cant, and I wish he wouldnt keep confusing me. Even more, I wish I could stop letting him.
  4. It's possible that she doesnt want to date you, and she just wants some comfort. I think, more plausibly that she does like you quite a bit, and that she doesnt want to commit until shes ready. If that's the case, she is respecting you an amazing amount by making sure that when she is with you, she will think of you and ONLY you. In the end, use your intuition. I've discovered that there has not been an instance when I thought someone was flirting with me and they were not. I told myself consistently that I was wrong or was imagining it, but trust yourself. You already know she has some feelings for you, but see if, with time, you can compare her actions towards you with her actions towards the other men shes cared for. Then maybe you can gauge more accurately.
  5. Even if a robot COULD think and act like a human, would it BE a human or just a humoid computer? Scientifically, once we understand the human brain to a greater degree, we may be able to replicate it, but is what makes us human our BRAINS or our MINDS? And if, as we know, the root of our ability to have 'minds' and thus personality is in our brains, then if we were ever able to duplicate brains, wouldn't minds be a logical corrolary? I don't know the answers, but neither does anyone else. The forseeable consequences for humanity are bleak, however:-Each individual part will have an audience, serving as replacement pieces for humans and creating a class of 'cyborgs'. This will be good.-Religion as we know it will either have to accept robots into their faiths as part of 'God's family' in order to appear tolerant and not indulge in hypocritically condescending behavior, or will have to condemn them as a blasphemy to God, the Creator. If religion condemns robots, instead of welcoming them, clinging to the philosophy that life is only ever possible from a divine being, then a) humanity may become conceited and robots made slaves (I, Robot-ish) or religion will fall from the apparent contradiction between its teaching and the reality of the world.-Humans will have to learn to live with another sentient species. This would not be bad, except that individual races cannot avoid massacring each other, so it seems unlikely peace would be sustainable between selfish and ignorant humans and their (initially) helpless adversaries.-Espianage will become much more sleek, but also much more dangerous. -The potential for disguised robot martyrs and kamakazi pilots misled or misprogrammed by their radical jihad or otherwise hate-filled masters increases significantlyRobots, like clones, could be bad news, but as a sci-fi lover I eagerly await their coming.
  6. I'd switch the serif font, Times New Roman, to something sans-serif like Arial. It'll look a lot cleaner that way. I don't like the giant bar that goes right under the header, and you could probably liven the side menu up a little bit. For the recent posts thingy, employ some padding-left to make sure the text doesn't hit the side of the site. I'd also try to make the posts thing more prominent seeing as your site is pretty much a giant forum. And lastly, bring some more color into your text! You use so much blue everywhere else, but not in your headers or the main text. Not too bad 4/10
  7. The playing style on the Wii is extremely innovative. I'm sick of sitting with a normal controller and just clicking buttons to move around. Think about it - for fishing, you can actually fish. For using the hookshot, you can actually point and maneuver it as if you were actually trying to grapple onto things. And it look especially fun in games like WarioWare: Smooth Moves. The only real qualm I have with the Wii is the graphics - they're not much of an improvement from the Gamecube (which was very pretty), and while people have been complaining about the graphics in Zelda, you have to understand that they're stylized. Link is never going to look more realistic than he looks in the graphic art that accompanies the games. As far as the PS3 goes - I don't think it's that much of an improvement over the PS2 either. It just boasts a $600 pricetag for the console itself, which feels like an enormous waste of money. With the Wii, you can get the console and at least 4-5 games for the amount of money that you spend on the PS3 alone. Plus I love Nintendo to pieces <3
  8. Actually, AFTER COMPLEX PERSONAL MEDITATION, my opinion has become this: if the internet were to combust somehow, the world would scream and cry and fuss for about thirty years before someone comes up with the monumental idea of the "NEW TELEGRAPH". It's not copyright infringement because it's new. Also, without Morse Code, we would be putting countless penguins in danger (the movie Happy Feet displays their necessity for beats and rhythm to communicate). So if someone was heartless enough to sever all the network cables of the world and challenge Wi-Fi to a FINAL BATTLE OH NOEZ, that would be the result. Mute penguins and sadness all around
  9. I think everyone participates in lateral thinking to some degree, they just dont realize it. Any type we pass into the subjunctive and utter a "what if..." we are engaging in lateral thinking. The difference is the terminology. The most interesting thing about giving such a specific label to analyzing the causality of events is that it made me reconsider standardized testing. Logical thinking is wonderful, but impractical. It's only when you re using lateral thinking, taking all possible circumstances into effect that you are actually prepared. True, a logical manager would do this by default, but not simply from a mathmatical equation. He/she would build in some extra time to spare from experience. The tests we give students today dont measure their abilities to apply these concepts, or at least not objectively. I recognize how difficult it would be to create, much less grade, an objective problem-solving test for students, but our current system relies upon the notion of black and white right or wrong answers when the world ought to be viewed as varying shades of gray. Teaching students to believe all problems have a single answer is misleading and dangerous. I know that I for one, have always 'over-analyzed' tests. I constantly called my teachers over to solidify the setting of the question because in one situtation it would be true, but not in another, and though one setting was implied nothing was explicit. It was yet another symptom of what they used to call 'alpha syndrome.' The children who passed the g/t tests in my classes all did the same thing.
  10. That doesnt mean they won't do it. Think back to the patriot act- wiretapping legalized while the nation was a frenzy of patriotism. If they have no qualms about recording our phonecalls or reserving the right to open our mail, why would they have a problem with storing our internet data? They already require libraries to keep track of which books they check out to whom and to report that, as well as to record each visitors browsing history if they have internet access. This is only the next step in rights infringement. If you are scared of it, and I sure as hell am, then watch who you elect and what their values are as well as what the laws you agree to let your congressmen pass ACTUALLY say. Don't let the fervor of nationalism or the terrorism-scare push you into capitulating your liberties, or mine. Yes, the terrorists are out there, and yes, we ned to try to stop-them. That also applies to sex-offenders, but let's a pick a more practical route that won't hurt the innocent citizens as much as the guilty.
  11. lets think about the companies themselves for a moment, and all of the technology they have released over the past few years-microsoft: xp, and soon vista. on the whole, everyone seems dissappointed with vista, and xp was never that great. they havent marketed mp3 players 'til now, and it seems like a copy cat move to hope that there is still money left in the music-storage device industry.apple: Has their own line of computers and laptops almost universally acknowledged as superior to all others, and at the very least no less than WORSHIPED by those that own their hardware/software. Has been making iPods for several years now, with a few changes and improvements. They already have the hang of the business.
  12. It's a bit complicated. I adore my friends and I love most of my classes. Our school is large, which means it has a lot of extracirricular programs, but it is also crowded. While the group of friends I surround myself with are amazing and brilliant and sweet. I watch the other students though, the ones who havent found a coveted place in Nerdom (even some of my fellow AP students), and though they are happy their lives seem miserable. Constant drama is being enacted in the halls, "Oh no you didnt!" and "OOOOOOO" (the universal rallying cry of fight lovers everywhere) are constant sentiments. Half of the school destroys English by using ebonics, and though our passing rate is relatively high, it seems that most of them are either clueless, stupid, struggling, lethargic, lazy, or otherwise out of it. They believe in wearing pants too low and too baggy, and are always bickering over who has the most "bling-bling". So, do I like our student body, not really. Do I like our campus, also not really. It's 1980s industrialized, cheapest multi-purpose brick you can find, with your typical drop ceiling and tin-roof. Two floors with fire resistant blue-with-specks carpet and thick fire proof doors. It often smells like feet. They recently recieved money from the district to add-on, and though we are overcrowded and have teachers who "drift" from room to room because there isnt space, they decided to build a new gym. We already have two, and the new one STILL isnt big enough to house all of the students. Also, traffic is horrible in the mornings because they didn't design the parking lot for efficiency, but for security.I do like the staff, or at least the advanced teachers. I like the equipment our district can buy for the computer labs and the classes. I like the ethnic mix- we are near NASA and their is a lot of international business. I like learning- its my favorite thing in the worldI just wish the other students felt that way.
  13. Hey you! (I dont know if I'm allowed to use your name, so I wont.) Forewarning: I'm asking a lot of questions. I would call, but I know you are busy debating for the time-being.As you can see, I gave in. I need hosting if I want my own blog, and as you said, the forum posting is easy. I have enough points for the first package now, but (even though I have no idea what I will do with all the space) I'm holding out for the 150 mgs. I'm considering adding a photoblog page on to, so that would eat up considerable memory. I can always redirect a domain to point to this account, right? I wouldn't be able to do that now, but I might in the future. This was posted so long ago that your site is no longer pink. did you ever decide to use the flash video? i think its pretty cool. I've actually been wanting to learn how to make my own flash productions, for use as a header or just something interesting on my main page. It's a bit distracting though, and I want the words and pictures to speak for themselves.How hard is it to change blogging softwares once you've gotten started using a specific brand? I want to try wordpress, but I'd like to be open to creating something on my own or switching to something else if it suits my fancy.Also, I wanted to ask you later, but I'm scared I will forget, how are you backing these files up? I remember when those weird hackers messed with your site, and you refreshed it and it all went away. How did you do that? You are, of course, obligated to show me. :lol:And of course, the stupid pixel is still not aligned right on lindsaysscribblings.com. I can't fix it! I'll ask you to help me with it later. Dreamweaver is irritating me. Do you use an outside editor, or just movable type?With the email you provide on your site, how do you prevent being spammed? Teach me your secrets, Oh Wise One. And good luck at today's tournament! (you probably won't check this until much later, *sigh*)Lindz.
  14. saying you are "building needs" does sound counterproductive. try something like, explain your needs and let us tailor our design around them or explain your needs and let us build around them or explain your needs and let us build a machine to fit also, some grammatical errors which make the page look slightly less polished than it could: Maybe run your content through spellcheck?The page design itself is very sleek. Notice from jlhaslip: Added qute tags per report
  15. I don't believe that anyone would simply chop off someone's head for the sake of retaining their brain and dna. It's more likely that dying man would stumble into the cryonics agency and ask to be frozen just as his body was beginning to stop working.I do agree that there are major ethical issues involved though, as well as practical ones.What if we never find a cure for X disease or master cloning (Dolly the sheep took 276 tries and so far the future doesnt look that much brighter, it takes many attempts to create a clone and usually they suffer from diseases or dna mutations), even though you paid cryonics insurance? Will they keep the bodies (or heads) indefinitely, or will they dispose of them eventually? Where would they be stored?What if they revive the wrong body?What if they can't make your neurons connect identically again?What if you had brain damage initially?What if you had insurance but your spouse didnt?What if your brain continued aging?What if, like in as in Demolition Man, you awake in the distant future and dont understand it? What if you wish you were dead? What if your children were still alive and older than you?And then there is the question of overpopulation. If cryonics became a pragmatic solution to death, the overwhelming majority of people would cling to it with desperate hope. The world can only hold so many people, and the dead were never intended to be among them. All of the extra mouths to feed will strain our agriculture to the point where many people could end up starving.
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