brainless

hmm ... except for this thorn-girl, I've heard about most of these diseases/mutations/whatever they are before, though it's probably not caused by nearby nuclear test sites (those are rather known for causing leucaemia (sp? ... some kind of blood cancer, if I'm not mistaken; radioactive materials (i.e. Depleted Uranium) are known to cause very strange malformations in children though those deformations do not resemble the things described in this post. There's at least one site with very graphic pictures of these babies on the net, I'll look it up when I find some time for it); smoking/drugs/alcohol during pregnancy/heavy smoking before pregnancy may cause several types of disabilities in the child (usually mental stuff) but also none of the above.If you ask me, the site you quote is about scaring people, usually young girls who buy this kind of stories as true if you mention "scientist"/"research" in the same breath you used to mention "abnormalities caused by XYZ"...girls: I did not mean to offend you, it's just my observation that those which take these stories for granted are usually girls around their 14s. If you think you're smarter than that I'm glad to hear that =)

Last weekend, an interview with Mrs Roth, one of Germany's Members of Parliament and leader of the Green Party has been published by an onlien newspaper. (*) large coalition: Since a couple of months, a coalition of the two major parties (out of 5 currently present in the parliament) governs the country. Usually, one of the major parties governs in coalition with one or two minor parties. The current government is able to change the constitution without help from non-governmental parties. The Green Party is one of the three minor parties currently present in parliament and was part of the coalition which ruled the country since 1998. All these sentences are just fine, except for the part with "War against Terrorism" (but that would be a whole other topic). Unfortunately, Mrs Roth was part of the governing coalition during the last seven years. The Green Party was necessary to pass several laws which Roth now criticizes, among them are...: * all telecommunications data (phone, fax, internet connection details, emails, ...) has to be stored for several years. As of now, this data piles' use is limited to "severe crimes" but the current government will probably expand the number of crimes which can be prosecuted using this data. * the right to private copies (of audio CDs, DVDs etc). Until some years ago, german law allowed everyone who buys a CD to create as many copies for personal use as they wanted and to pass them on to close friends. You can't do neither of this anymore without doing something illegal. * the "air safety law" (has been overruled by the federal supreme court as 'violates the constitution'): Planes which can not be contacted via radio were supposed to be shot down. The difference between Roth's words (as quoted above) and her actions (passing these and other laws) are obvious: Last year, she was member of the governing coalition, now she's member of the opposition. It's the opposition's job to criticize the government. Obviously, this means criticizing things you are (in parts) responsible for without criticizing yourself. Our Head of State, President Horst Koehler, said something like "I will not sign any law [passed by the government] if I don't like it." (**) He said that he thinks the "air safety law" might violate the constitution in one of its fundamental parts. He signed it anyway. (**) In Germany, laws have to been signed by the President before they are valid. If a law does not get the President's signature, it has to be debated in parliament again... ... does it really surprise anyone that people feel they don't have to care about politics because those in charge do what they want anyway, that you can't rely on a politician to do what he said he'd do?

I think I can agree with you in some points, kasm, and one note before I start discussing: The first three types of evolution you mention, Cosmic/Chemical/Stellar; Planetary Evolution (i-iii), are not taught to be kinds of evolution in german schools (though I can see why it might be tempting to call these processes "evolution"), so I will not discuss them right now. As I'm only starting this post now, I can't tell what I will discuss but I will certainly not discuss this I will also leave out Organic Evolution (iv) as I am not familiar with Redi's and Pasteur's work(s?) on this.by the way: Thanks for structuring your post clearly. I've gotta think about adapting a similar style of creating large posts...I dropped biology after 10th Grade (= 3 years before graduation) 'cause it didn't fit into my timetable in 11th grade and after that I wasn't allowed to continue. It might happen that I mix up some terms, if you think I did so - don't hesitate to tell me that you think I'm mistaken...to (v) Macro Evolution (lack of transitional fossils): Actually, there are transitional types of species in the fossil records. Several types of man-like species have been found which are neither human nor ape. Most famous of those might be the "Neandertaler" who are supposed to have co-existed along with early *person* sapiens (at least co-existed in the dimension of time, archeologists do not agree whether they had rather peaceful relationships when they met or whether they rather fought each other).The development of birds also has some transitional fossils, some kinds of two-legged creatures with feathers which were definitely not capable of flying and the Archaeopteryx (-ix?; the first one was found three years before Darwin published his work on the "Origin of Species"). The Archaeopteryx shows signs of reptiles (claws, teeth) and birds (feathers, wings, large brain). As usual, "scientists" do not agree on how much of a bird and how much of a reptile this creature was but most agree that it was neither pure bird nor pure reptile. Probably the first found "missing link".To predict how something will evolve (as in adapt to new circumstances) is hard since it is hard to determine what the world will look like in 100 years (this should not be long enough for macro-evolution), how should someone be able to predict what the world looks like in 1,000,000 years and how it gets to look like that? This would be necessary to make predictions on evolution. Maybe the species which follows mankind grows another set of arms?

I've just started Silkroad Online (-> http://www.joymax.com/silkroad/) with some friends of mine and, according to them, the graphics are better than those of World of Warcraft and the quests aren't that much different - but: It's free (but a huge download though that shouldn't be a problem for those who have internet access fast enough to play such games...) one point against it: At least for me and my friends, it takes a second or something before the game reacts to actions, so we have to pay attention on our surroundings 'cause we'd be standing in front of a stronger enemy for a second or something before our chars start running. this might not be a problem for other people as we think none of their servers are in Europe...

According to a recently passed german law and a EU guideline, phone companies have to store all connection data (who called who and how long did the call take), ISPs are supposed to store who had which IP and browsed which sites for 2 years, short messages and eMails have to be stored for 6 months. At this time, only law enforcement agencies are supposed to be able to access these data sets in severe cases like when they suspect someone to be a terrorist, whatever that means these days. well, this is going to be a huge data pool and huge amounts of data attract people who'd like to use this. Music and Movie Corporations would be interested in those internet connections which had more than let's say 150MB of traffic (it's hard to reach that by simply browsing the web like "normal" persons do), other law enforcement agencies might want to get this data in order to prosecute "minor" crimes, a boss might want to know who wrote an annoying piece of opinion online so they can warn and/or fire an employee - and some of these scenarios did happen already, I'll provide sources on request. The saying is "Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear", meaning that if you don't do anything illegal, you're not going to get in trouble. Since I've been assaulted by cops for no reason, I don't believe in this anymore, so what can I, what can we do about this? One thing we can do is encrypting eMails since it is easy to run a search through plain text-Mails whereas an encrypted eMail has to be cracked first. With current home computers, it's possible to encrypt files strong enough so it would take ages to brute-force them with currently available technology, it should even be hard to do this for secret services... ...but why should you do this if you've got nothing to hide? well, especially the part about storing emails is a critical thing, this is just like "every postal service has to open every letter it transports, make a copy of it and keep it in its archives, available to anyone who gains access - with the feature that they can easily be used to create a profile about you. Without asking for your consent. Do you really want this? You can get the Gnu Privacy Guard and Front-Ends for it on https://www.gnupg.org/ and, apart from a discussion on this topic, I'd like to know whether there are people around here who'd like to have a tutorial on how to set up the GnuPG, the one or other useful front end and <email client of your choice> to encrypt emails you write...

congrats to your free computer =) deleting everything would only be my second choice, something similar happened to me a couple of months ago in one of the university's computer rooms:I went in to use a pc and noticed that someone left a floppy disk hand-labelled "University" in the drive. Knowing that some people consider storing their data on a floppy disk (or, more modern people: a CD- or DVD-RW) and carrying that around is all they need to protect their data from accidental deletion or loss (or even unauthorized access), I had a look at the data on it.I've been able to figure out whom this disk belonged to within a couple of minutes and sent the owner an email that I've taken care of the disk and would drop it off at their doorstep somewhen later that day...well, this person was, as she wrote me the other day, very lucky: On this disk was the only copy of her Doktorarbeit (the "old" --the last Doktorarbeiten will be written in 2009-- german version of a Master's Thesis), which she's already been working on for some months...

actually, it's already possible to make "artificial" diamonds (they look just like "real" diamonds, except for some inpurities which only experts can recognize) ... they're used on those drills made for cutting through stone etc and usually don't get past a certain (small) size since it takes ages to manufacture them but they're still way cheaper than "real" diamonds...anyways, if my girlfriend came and asked me for a diamond ring, I'd ask for her credit card ... I can buy it for her but I'm not the one who's going to pay since I can't afford it (full stop). Even if I could afford it, I suppose I'd rather spend the money on something useful (ok, something beautiful might do it too ... but diamond rings are neither use- nor beautiful...)

yes, it is a bad thing if someone edits an article in the wikipedia in order to make him/herself or one's boss look better;no, the US government's not as bad as people in Europe say. I'm european myself and I'm far from liking the current US government but it's just as bad not to differentiate.This case has been reviewed by the wikipedia staff. yes, there have been some very bad edits, the average on the other hand doesn't look that bad:More than 1,000 (that's one thousand) edits were retraced to the House of Representative (or Congress? I'm not too familiar with the translations of US government bodies to german)'s proxy server.Of these 1,000-and-a-bit edits, only few were of a quality which could be called "bad faith", most anonymous changes could even be called constructive. When they checked the registered users which participated from the House of Representative's network, they found that all of those users participated in a constructive way and usually did not show too much of an interest in political articles.Users from the Senat's network however produced way more "bad faith"-edits but those were less manipulative than childish: One Senator was accused of smelling like horse sh*t, another one was said to be the largest know-it-all in Senat.well, the latter ones are somewhat easy to recognize as information which is not to be trusted.by the way, it's not only members of the US government which behave in such a bad way - during the last campaigns for the federal election in Germany, some politicians who were sure to get seats in parliament anyway tried to file law suits against wikipedia 'cause there was some information in there which they did not want to be available in public during election campaigns and some anonymous users changed the articles to more politician-friendly style.One politician even tried to convince the wikipedia community on the Discuss this article-pages to remove some information which he considered to be not true ... well, they're still in there and bundled with evidence even better than what has been there before he tried to change it...

I'll definitely stick to my wired home network, there's no problem with WiFi-Hijackers if there is no WiFi network by the way, the wired network technology for home users is not at 100MBps anymore but it has reached 1GBps already (and I'm using it already ); there are 10GBps-devices for pro-users but they didn't reach the end-user market and there will probably not be a use for that in home networks for the next couple of years, especially not while WiFi hasn't reached the upper limits yet...... but ... well ... 630MBps wireless sounds nice I wonder when there will be hard drives able to cope with that...

According to an article [tampatrib.com] in The Tampa Tribune from Wednesday, the daily work of a group of religious fundamentalists has been severely disturbed due to actions taken according to the US Patriot Act about four months ago. The group's main bank account was frozen, deposits were not accepted and 22 checks bounced. Anonymous sources say that state agencies were involved and some Visa could not be paid; for unknown reasons none of the religious fundamentalists was arrested. ...hooray Patriot Act (edit: fixed topic title - It's a Bank Account, not a Ban Account)

wow, that'd be great although I fear that those who need this drug the most won't be able to afford it

ongnoai: I will not claim that I'm right all along my posts and especially in this thread I've gone to a somewhat extreme position... anyways, I'm just reassuring myself that I mentioned that somewhere It's not especially wrong for Germany to do what everyone else does, it's just that it doesn't get better if many people do it instead of just a few... I hope that I am not too much affected by this syndrome. Actually I sometimes feel urged to need to point out the good things about the nazi regime when everybody else says "we all know that it was bad all over the place" [well, they achieved a very low unemployment rate; destroyed large natural areas in the name of 'civilizing' them (our recent governments outsourced this job), ...] I don't agree with the "responsible behavior" but I suppose it's a behavior accepted by those who are in power in other nations and those who follow them more or less without questioning them (or maybe it's just me)... I like most parts of the rest of your post and don't think it's necessary to go into details well, after WWI Germany wasn't treated too nicely (hey, actually the Austrians started it, we just gave them a carte blanche to do so) and it's pretty sure that WWII might not have happened if the Treaty of Versailles had looked more friendly ... after WWII the winning powers were very friendly with the german people, though it's a pity that we were granted an own army it would have been nice if Germany could have set an example that even a nation without an army of its own can become one of the most powerful nations on earth... (I think there was something I wanted to write but I can't remember it and don't have the time to rethink 'cause I've gotta get to SKAmbulé's last show ever )

For more information and advise on side-effects, talk to elder people or read a history book. yeah, Cochello Valley sounds much like an english-speaking area to me ... if you wanna speak english, go to places which have english names, that might help you a lot... anyway, enough ranting about the way you behave. Guess what? Large parts of what is nowadays considered US territory was claimed and settled in by the Spanish until only few generations ago. If you buy land, don't expect the people to learn your language just because you'd like them to... ...I could start a rant about how united the "United" States of America are but that would lead off-topic...

cerebral: right, we're violating this treaty (though they've got it covered with some obscure reasons why this shouldn't be a violation of the NPT...) OCAC: my claim holds just as much arguments to back it up as the claims that Iran is developing "the bomb" has. Need a prove? There is no evidence on either, just reasons why it should be reasonable for both countries to develop nuclear weapons. I will give you a quote from an article about german claims to a permanent seat in the UN Security Council with quotes from a book by our former Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Joseph "Joschka" Fischer: (well, the sentences were a bit tricky ... I hope I got them right but I think you can get the point...) With the current chancelloress (sp?) and the Christian-Democratic Union [CDU; rather conservative] being back in the government, some of their members of parliament began to spread the word that it is nonsense to shut down all german nuclear power plants until 2030 as it was planned by the Green party which was part of the former government coalition. The energy corporations which own those nuclear power plants lobby in favor of them. well, how are we supposed to threaten a nation with nuclear weapons if we don't have them ourselves? And as the draft european constitution says, we are to increase our military abilities - having the bomb and carrier weapon systems would increase them a huge deal, wouldn't it? ...but did you see how the other people just fell for my headline which didn't have anything but speculations to back it up? Though it would be nice to know what kind of research they do at the FRM II in Garching...

I think I've read a headline about someone who's been executed by the USA being found innocent half a year later on amnesty.org ... I was looking for something specific so I didn't take my time to read the article :/ but you might want to have a look at this article: (beware: long text) http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ well, this is an extremely shortened version of the full text, I definitly recommend reading it completely... ...releasing someone from prison and giving him a little money (2 million from state pockets ... they've got lots more...) might be ok ... but you can't undo killing someone. I believe I'm right when I call the US government killers...

I just found an article in a newspaper which is being distributed for free at my university, the "Zeitung gegen den Krieg" ("Newspaper against the War") which actually scared me, knowing the way Bavaria's government used to behave in the past: I think it is a real threat to the rest of the world that a country which did not use its influence on global politics to stop wars [Germany did/does participate in the attack wars on Kosovo, Afghanistan and, against public statements, Iraq]; which openly admits to increase its military abilities [european draft constitution: "All member states have to increase their military abilities on an annual basis"] and recently began to support US threats against other countries and stockpiles at least 16 and up to 50 pre-built nuclear weapons from the USA [breach of the non-proliferation treaty!] gains access not only to instructions how to build nuclear weapons (you can find out how to do this in just about any university library) but also to all the materials necessary to do so.Someone please call for sanctions against Germany at the UN Security Council. If necessary, boycott german products. --by the way, I'd like to mention that I'm german myself so there's no need to play the "racist"-card against me...--

lol ... btw, my result was correct

right, the Vent is a nice place, even though some people seem to complain too much...it might seem reasonable to put your own complaint into another thread about a similar thing ... but in the worst case, this could start a debate about who's suffering more, that would be kinda contraproductive, wouldn't it? (oh, by the way, yes, I tend to point out the bad things so they can be improved and forget to mention the good things, I hope you can deal with that =))

woah, thanks ... I belong to those people who can get the "complicated" stuff done but need tutorials for things as simple as that well, I guess I never bothered to look at that since the start buttons properties page wasn't of any use in Win9x and 2k...

oh yeah, always love those kids ... my theory when I worked at an outdoor swimming pool last year was that those kids don't get enough attention at home...

technically, singling someone out based on religious factor does not qualify as racist since religion does not equal race (there's not even something one could call the "jewish race" ... it's a religion...).anyways, basing the insult on your appearance, intelligence, whatever wouldn't have made it less difficult. "you nasty little <person who wears jeans>" ... it's not too large a step to "friggin' @$$***** who wear jeans, let's kill 'em all" from such a remark (actually, such a remark made it into the charts ... "cool kids don't wear blue jeans")...before you tell everybody, it might be better to try to find out if she's got it in for jews or not ... she doesn't sound like a person whom I'd like to spend more time than necessary with anyways...

inspiron: nVidia already has a great linux driver for just about all chips (they follow a one-driver-all-chips-policy ... it's not easy to pick the wrong one anymore :/ )there are already many of the (I'll call them like that) "major" games running on Linux: Quake I, II, III (I don't know about IV); UT up to 2004 (and therefore all games on the Quake or UT engine are or should be playable on Linux); Diablo II; Neverwinter Nights......anyways, I'm not that much of a gamer but I've got an ATI chip in my laptop... *signed*

actually I'm not that much into gaming and I can live perfectly well without knowing the exact storyline of "shoot-em-all XIV" ... and I'm kind of scared of the idea of running a webserver on an xbox ... how would you write the config with these controllers anyways?by the way, if you wait some time before getting that game you'll get the game and the hardware much cheaper ... if it's really the best game ever, it won't become bad by the time you can afford it...

*I'd like to follow up on that with a simple number*Just about any language changes so much that native speakers won't recognize it anymore within about 500 years...

I hope you're just kidding about the African government ... there are quite some differences between the situation in super-sahara africa [super-sahara 'cause the other side's called sub-sahara] and sub-sahara africa?sultan: Thanks for your explanation of Islam. well, you will receive a similar reply from just about any Christian, except for the part of accepting other religions [there's quite a difference between reformed ("protestant") christianity, Catholism and within the Catholists the roots are way more liberal than the Vatican is...