Watermonkey

Matak, I was thinking the very same thing when I was reading through the article! I definitely would prefer to build something that costs less, is less of an impact on the environment when making it, and lasts thousands of years to the garbage materials they use to build buildings today!

Well, I think Mr. Haslip mentioned that the tax on fuel is around 33%. That would surely account for much of the price difference right there. I've driven in Canada many times and I'm not convinced that all that tax goes to maintain the roads there, but what do I know? Bureaucracies always cost a lot to run, so that's probably a good part of where all that money goes as well. Also, due to their very low population density up there and the fact they still have so much asphalt to maintain, there's just less money to go around, so naturally the cost per person is going to be higher. I think it's disingenuous to compare a commodity that people use every day to travel, like gasoline, to a substance like perfume, where just a couple ounces may last for years. It's just an example of how the media spins lies and half-truths to convince the mass population of one view or another. You may as well compare the price of gold vs the price of tin. Well, they're both metals! Why the heck is gold so bloody expensive? Oh, well, when you compare the price of gold to the price of palladium, it's quite a bargain. Forget about the fact that the supply of palladium is nearly non-existent compared to gold or that demand is higher for one then the other... The only thing I got out of that "report" is I'm sure glad I don't have to use perfume, printer ink, champaign, or, heaven forbid, blood, to fuel the engine of my car! (Though at times I feel like I'm paying for it with blood!) I wouldn't want the media to talk about things that matter like what the actual costs are associated with bringing oil out of the earth, refining it, and bringing it to my local fueling station for my consumption. We wouldn't want to inform the public of the costs associated with that, then we might actually have a clue as to why the oil company revenues are at record levels and are higher then most country's GDPs! (That's Gross Domestic Product) John Q. Public might start asking questions about why the government(s) pay such ludicrously high entitlements to these oil companies (can you say, "Corporate Welfare"?) when their funding for alternative energies such as bio-fuels like bio-diesel and H2 (both can be considered as solar power) is only a tiny drop in the bucket in comparison. Why, JQP might actually wake up to the fact he's being soaked and taken by greedy special interests and he might actually get together with his friends and revolt against the whole corrupt system! Vote Ron Paul -2008!

According to new research the pyramids were actually made by casting the stones from a concrete-like mix of limestone, lime, and diatomaceous earth that was mixed so perfectly and consistently that no scientist even suspected it until recently. There are still some details to be worked out such as how they actually made all the inner chambers and how they hoisted all that mix to the top to pour in the capstone, but the atomic science doesn't lie, those stones are unlike any limestone that can be found anywhere in nature. Yet another example of how you'll have to unlearn what you "learned" in school!

I'll start, I may add to the list, but as far as I know, Monsanto is the world's most EVIL and destructive corporation. Monsanto Corp (NYSE: MON) has almost single-handedly decimated the honey bee populations in the western hemisphere (Bee keepers who keep their bees "organic" say they've seen no population declines!). They've destroyed the fertile lands in much of the western hemisphere by poisoning the soil with their chemicals. They've made the tomato without fish genes a rarity at your local supermarket and it's nearly impossible to find corn that hasn't been cross-pollinated with one of their GMO crops. They pretty much own most of the law makers in the western world and have successfully sued farmers for growing crops that were cross-pollinated with their own "patented" crops via the wind in Canada! They're behind the movement in Congress to tag all livestock and register the farm (or property) on which they're kept as well as trying to destroy all non-GMO seed stocks. They've all but put the small farmer out of business forcing them to buy their dangerous poisons or be pushed out of the markets not unlike the cattle barons of the 19th century using local law and other nefarious tactics to force their competition to succumb. Unfortunately, their company (like the EVIL company portrayed in The Omen) will end up killing everyone if it has its way. But lawmakers mostly don't care about what happens after they've left office or what their grand-children have to deal with when they're gone. Name the most EVIL Corp. in the world as you know. This isn't an argument, it's strictly opinion. There are many contenders, like Dow Chemical or Microsoft, many many companies have EVIL agendas, even Nestl? has an EVIL history. Let's learn about what these companies do or have done to make them EVIL. I'll assume we all know what EVIL is... I'm talking true evil, not the fun we have with the concept here on the forum.

Thanks reelkill. I'm reading up on these things and it seems the general consensus is to avoid anything that MTD owns which includes Cub Cadet, Yard Machines, and Troy-bilt. I'm not impressed by customer reviews of the Husky so far either. I'll research Craftsman in a little bit and report my findings on that as well. One thing I'm hesitant about concerning Craftsman is the engine they use, the B&S is one of the loudest engines around... Maybe they're not all the same though...

Ok, so I'm already sick and tired of mowing this monster by hand even with a self-propelled mower from Costco (it's going back, the self-propelled part is extremely weak). It took a total of about 3.5 hours yesterday to mow this mess and I hit a half dozen rocks doing it. I've got to get a couple yards of top soil dumped near the leach field and start filling in holes and do some basic landscaping and I've really got to get a riding lawnmower to take the strain off my aging body. I'm not getting any younger you know! So I was at Lowes the other day and I was looking at last years model of the "Big Red Horse" by Troy-Bilt. (No, that isn't a typo.) The Troy-bilt from last year has a 23 HP Kohler engine in it as opposed to the Briggs & Stratton used in the current model. I've heard and read from many sources the Kohler is considered more refined, quieter, and longer lasting. The other difference between last year and this year's model is last year they didn't have a low gear available but this year they do. I, personally, have no need for a low gear range so that's not a problem for me. The price difference between the two is about $400. I've read some bad things about Troy-bilt too, so I'm hesitant to warm up to it even though it's really pretty much everything I need at a fair price. The Cub Cadet from Home Despot is a strong contender too, but their prices aren't as good as Lowes. I'm looking at anywhere from 20 to 26 HP so I can cruise up hills with ease and generally have a comfortable time of it. Help me find the best bang for the buck with a good warranty and good reviews from customers... I'd like to spend at or under $2000 for this machine. I'd like to hear if anyone has any personal experience with any of the riding mower/ tractors too...

Hey, Biscuitrat, I hate to burst your little bubble of whatever that was, because I can see you really took a while to think all that out and write it up, but my post was actually just a little bit of satire. Clue: Sadam is in hell on SouthPark. If you don't live in America, Southpark is a comedy show and it's animated and everyone but Kenny and all Mormons go to hell on that show. Helps to have a little context I suppose to get the punchline. Also, the tone I was shooting for was one of Satire, you know... "IT'S JUST WRONG!" Well, I suppose I can't pass on the tone of my voice as I'm writing, but it seems like satire is lost of a great many people in this forum... Age difference I guess... Also, I never mentioned Christianity, I'm sure that's not the only religion that believes in a hell or eternal damnation. I wrote a much more entertaining post, but one of you sniveling sensitive weasels went crying to a Mod who was obligated to remove it (the part that was too over the top -but very funny). I don't know how half of the people who are on this forum are going to survive in the real world where there isn't always a cop walking with you every where you go and some really mean person decides you look like a good time...

If you're just now building your wireless network, you best bet is to use pre-n hardware from the same manufacturer. Pre-n (802.11n) is going to be the next big thing in wireless networking when the standard is adopted in 2008, but many companies, including Apple and Intel are already adopting it as the standard is pretty well set now. The range will increase tremendously with pre-n and will also carry with it significant speed increases. If you already have a network set up and you're looking to increase your range, I know a friend tried an accessory from ccrane.com and he tells me it's works beautifully. I don't recall now if the product he bought was the antenna booster or the receiver booster, but it works like magic. Find an assortment at http://www.ccrane.com/!c4wnhAqZ2jXGgSNVpKVjOw!/Antennas/WiFi-Antennas?by=Category . Happy hunting, and let us all know what you decided to do. I, for one, would be interested.

Um... What the heck is a Horde?

To embrace "Atheism" as your own brand of religion, or lack thereof if you prefer, is the ultimate arrogance. To be Agnostic, means you accept there is a higher power, but you're still working out the answer to who or what that higher power is. To be atheist is to know there is no higher power, to know all religions are wrong and to know that after life there is nothing. I find this absolutely incredible. It's the intellectual equivalent of saying you know the earth is flat and observation completes your delusions! You're as fanatic about ignoring the obvious evidence to the contrary as Jerry Falwell was about preaching his brand of Christianity! Simple observation should indicate to you, as it did for Einstein and millions before him, that there must be some kind of higher power to make all this mess come together! Mathematics, many say the language of God, proves it!

Give it up Jasper. Butt piracy is just wrong, you're going to hell! MUHAHAHAHA! I love how you decided to start taking shots at his writing skills instead of picking at his arguments... Sadam is waiting in hell for you... Cause you're consciously going against every religion and what you do is just UNNATURAL! It's just WRONG! Notice from truefusion: Don't tell people they're going to hell. Added strikes.

I use my computer for the nefarious purpose of attempting to compute the prime number of evil... It may take some time, so I'll let you all know what it is when I get there, but if the world comes to an end before I get a chance to say anything, you'll know it was me... And I found the magic number of evil...

Hey AD. I'm in complete agreement with you regarding the premise of your argument, but I'd suggest you write a paper, a good well-researched paper, about the topics you bring up here regarding whos land is whos and who killed who in the 1600's. You can always dust off your paper when one is assigned at some point in time later. Meanwhile, you'll have the facts on your side when you argue your point to these Mexicans who think they have some kind of claim on CA, AZ, and NM. La Rasa means "The Race" and is obviously indicative of a Race War between the dark-skinned Mexican criminal class and the Americans of European decent. They actually intend to kill as many of us as possible in what will become the War of ****(I can't think of the name of the war right off the top of my head, I'll edit later) all over again. Anyway, the Louisiana Purchase was from the French and the Spanish Conquistadors killed Montezuma and the Mayans, not the Mexicans. I'll add more to this when I've got more time, but I love the topic!

Short answer to your question to me is they won't be working for any multi-million (or billion) dollar companies, except for janitorial duties...

Sadly, he's right. I only use FF to view the Xisto.com because the shoutbox, indeed, does not work in Safari. Kind of a bummer if you ask me...

From what I know of neural networks (that's the description for most animals' brains) dreaming and sleeping are both necessary for proper function and to recover from the days input. Even a fictional android in the fictional universe of Star Trek, Data, must sleep and must dream. Any creature, weather man-made or not, that uses a neural net for its brain composition dreams and sleeps according to currently accepted science. The answer to the age-old question, Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep, is most likely, if their CPUs are built in a neural network, yes. Do ants dream? Maybe, I'm not sure if they incorporate neural networks, but I'd imagine they, too, dream...According to my admittedly rudimentary understanding of dreams, sleep, and neural networks, dreaming is the brains way to take an abstract object that was sensed during the awake time and apply various fantastic contexts to its existence and file those away for the next time the object is encountered. Then, based upon the encounter and observation, the brain can go through, during the next sleep, and reject the fantasies (dream fragments) that don't fit the new information gleaned from the most recent experience.

Actually, the truth of the matter is the only one I know who's ruining academic writing is St. Michael himself! I mean, go look at the second word in his initial post on this thread! (hint: "Thought" ends with a "T") Edit: I should not have said that since he promptly went and corrected the error, but just read most anything he writes and you'll see what I'm talking about. You can't correct it all, Mike! :unsure:Ok, seriously, you should be able to go into "chat mode" or "text mode" and still have a "formal writing mode" you can go to. If you can't jump around, your teacher should be extra diligent in catching all the improper language you've used in school and grade you accordingly. I don't get how so many illiterate people are managing to produce high school diplomas these days! I think there are only one or two generations of literate people left, then they'll be the minority. We're working our way back toward the dark ages at a frightening velocity!

Off topic for the start: OpaQue, several of us looked Mermaid's post over up and down left and right and couldn't for the life of us figure out what was so offensive in it that would cause you to actually say what you said. Then ensued a heated discussion in the shoutbox regarding the pros and cons of the word "hun". I don't know if you're all that familiar with Americana and traditional slang here, but the term "hun" is actually short for "honey" but "honey" is generally considered too familiar to use in mixed company of strangers, "hun", on the other hand, is generally acceptable, if a little on the condescending side but in no way is it "racist" or "Politically Incorrect" or offensive in any culture I'm aware of. Are you now telling the forum that "hun" is off limits? Maybe you should post a thread and list all the words you don't want everyone to use so we're all on the same page. (BTW, Mermaid, it's usually spelled "hon". That spelling probably would've saved us all a lot of grief! ) On topic: Dairy, specifically, American dairy is mostly to blame for the over-saturation of hormones, specifically female hormones, and the first symptom is pudgy early developing kids of both genders. There are other poisons in the environment, but if you want your kids to maintain some semblance of good health, the very first thing you should do is cut off all food not labeled "organic" and forbid them to eat junk food that contains high-fructose corn syrup and vegetable shortening. That's just for starters. Next, source your cheese from a "Raw" milk source, common in France and Switzerland, Raw milk is the only healthy way to make cheese and contains the enzymes that actually make it good for you. Otherwise you're just eating "dead food" and it'll do nothing good for you. Calcium isn't readily absorbed from milk contrary to what the dairy industry would have you believe and should be sourced from vegetables like broccoli and other greens. Don't believe what you see on TV or what your Doctor says regarding diet. Doctors aren't required to take any nutrition courses in college and often have the worst eating habits of all professions and the TV is just trying to sell you something. Visit a "Health food" store. They're everywhere. Even Safeway has an organic line of food now including baby formula.

You've got to maintain your perspective. In order to be positive, you must understand its counterpart, "negative". The opposites are necessary for balance in the universe, but it's still your free-will choice to embrace one or the other. In the end we all, born in to original sin, have embraced them both, but what's really important is what you want to manifest in your life. If all you want is death, bloodshed, pain, slavery and the like, then you'll have to carry out the occasional good deed to make people think you're working toward a goal of peace and "light", while, in reality, you're actually just disarming the sheep so that you may slaughter them all when the time is right and their defenses are down. If, on the other hand, you desire nothing but good things, then you'll be wanting to seek the light and shun the darkness. What you want to manifest in your life is what you'll be spending your time dreaming about and focusing on. It's simple really: there are creatures of the dark that feed on other creatures of the dark and hate and fear the "light beings". And, as a person of light, you'll be wary of straying too far from the path in the woods when it's dark and always carry two flashlights with you to see the way because just one wrong step and you could be taken.

One other thing you all might not know about dust, much of it is from outer space. That's right! Dust comes from many sources including extra-terrestrial! So the next time you taste a drop of rain, you might also be ingesting a little bit of some far away long ago exploded star. It's ok though, since we're composed of stardust anyway. Carry on...

You obviously don't have gophers, do you TF? :unsure:I personally will shoot as many as possible, but that's pretty difficult. The cats don't seem to be very interested, probably because the gophers are kinda large. I've never actually gotten anything from the store, but I was thinking that thing on a stake that vibrates at E.L.F. and drives the animals away might work. I would consider a live trap, but that's such a pain and then you have to transport them to somewhere else and they become someone else's problem... I heard that if you fill a five gallon bucket about half full of water and spread some birdseed/ sunflower seed on the surface, they'll go for the seed and fall in the bucket and drown... Let us know what you decide to do, I'd be interested too since we've got what amounts to a rodent infestation around here too.

You know what's even cooler (to me)? A date that occurred in my lifetime, back when I turned 18 to be exact. It was 1987, February, Friday the 13th with a true FULL moon! A Friday the 13th with a full moon won't occur again in our lives, and for it to be a birthday, well that won't happen to one in a million people. If only there was some kind of monetary reward for that kind of luck...

Mark my words: If you have the ability to acquire firearms and ammo, stock up now. These two things along with gold and silver and other "real" property will be the only things one can barter with when the "federal reserve note" issued by the most indebted government on Earth looses it's value much more. The USD (That's United States Dollar) recently, like this week, fell to an all-time low against the Euro and there's no bottom in site as its fall continues. The value of the USD is at 1.5 cents compared to a dollar in 1913. Think about that for a second. At least Canada has actual value backing its currency like mining and oil/ natural gas. The U.S. has less and less and hasn't had tangible backing since the government removed the gold and silver backing a long long time ago. Was it in the 50's? I don't recall now. The Federal Reserve is a private family-run banking cartel that pretty much runs the world's banks, and, as long as people believe their money has value, they hold all the power of the planet's people. As soon as, or if people ever wake up and deny them that power, all the paper fiat currency they've issued in the world will be completely worthless, except for starting fires. The United States government is intentionally devaluing the currency in order to make the North American Union more palatable to the populations of US, Canada, and Mexico. Once the union is created and the U.S. constitution, arguably the most important and powerful government document in the modern world, is voided, then the Amero will be the new currency and all means of self-defense will also be outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns -and I'll be one of them! I'll never let my defense be left to the hands of the police, because the police are rarely right there when you need them; they only show up to record the history of events. They should be called "armed historians" for all they're worth! When that time comes, when firearms are outlawed, there will automatically be some 50 million armed criminal class of the population, a larger number of armed people then any army on earth! A vast majority of these people are qualified snipers from their hunting skills and a very high number of them will have been trained by the military. There will be bloodshed and lives lost, but as Jefferson once said, "The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots now and then." (or something like that) The second amendment to the constitution of the United States of America, if one actually looks at the Federalist Papers and correspondence between the signers of this vastly important document, was always intended as a method of maintaining arms in the civilian ranks equal to the arms in the ranks of the Army. They were specific because they'd just overthrown the oppressive British Empire because the civilian population had the same arms as the enemy. Thus they realized the unequivical importance of maintaining an even battle field. They also understood the tendancy of any government to become tyranical so they attempted to make it clear that a "well regulated" malitia be maintained. "Well regulated" in the day simply meant that the arms were in good and proper working order and that the people who owned them knew well how to use them. Any able-bodied male of a certain age range (most places 17-40 years or so of age) is automatically a member of their state's unorganized militia and could, by law, be called up to fight in the defense of their state. That's today, not two hundred years ago. Read your state's constitution. You may just be a member of the unorganized militia and not even know it! So, Mike (and others who may agree), just because you don't NEED a rifle capable of firing a bullet a half inch in diameter over two miles accurately, doesn't mean the need won't EVER exist! It's a fun sport (the only roll the .50 BMG rifles have ever had to date in the civilian population) and it's one that just might save your butt one day! There's no way for you to predict the "necessity" of a particular firearm based upon it's cycle rate, the amount of noise it emits, or the size of projectile it expels, but if I were a betting man, and I am in this case, I'd bet there's always a need to prepare for the worst, and hope for the best! I can't see the harm in that, because there's no harm to see. Walk around with a large rifle and chances are excellent "the man" won't mess with you. Walk around with your blankey, sucking your thumb and asking people if they've seen yo momma, and I'd bet they'll mess you up good!

That's the best sarcastic post I've seen for quite a while man! I love it! Though Haslip's subtle hint on longer more meaningful posts was good too... Yes, this semi-advanced planet of ape-like animals has figured out how to launch large hunks of glass and electronic controllers into orbit around the Earth and many of these gadgets have been tasked to find nearby planetary bodies. Unfortunately, we're still not to the level yet that these ingenious devises can detect bodies as small as the ball of mud we live on, they're getting smaller all the time. They've still got a lot of progress to be made, though. Oh, and 28k light years is really really really close to Sol, in the grand scheme of things. Like spitting distance compared to a planet on the other side of Andromeda...