k_nitin_r

The only way that they are going to reduce gun-related crimes is to have a total nation-wide ban on guns of all kinds, with retrospective effect. What I mean is that simply banning the possession and use of guns is not enough - the nation has to enforce the policy all over and should also buy-back guns that were sold to existing gun owners. That would be a whole lot of money for the government to use in getting back the guns and routing all of them to its military, and a lot of weapons manufacturers would be rather unhappy about the policy, but that's the only way gun-related crimes can be reduced. If there are no guns, there are no gun-related crimes. Maybe we would then start seeing swords becoming more common, but at least there would be no gun related crimes wherein one person can go on a shooting spree and kill a dozen other people before shooting himself/herself. With a sword, the killer would have to hunt down the victims one at a time and so the most he or she can do is take down two or at most three victims before getting taken down by law enforcement agents. Unless the government gets really short-handed, it does not need citizens with guns killing people when they go lunatic, and the only way that can do that is to say, "No Guns, end of discussion."

Moodle can actually give you a whole report on all of the student activities for the course. It even goes as far as telling you what the students were thinking when they answered a question... did they click on one radio button and then change their minds and click on another radio button? Did they finish early? A downside is that if the students do not finish on time, they get a zero on the quiz and there doesn't seem to be any way to get Moodle to grade them on the answers that they did mark.BTW, the quiz engine in Moodle is the feature that most people use it for - it has an import/export system, it supports options with partial credit, it supports calculated results where you can get Moodle to randomly select values within a range, and it can compute the correct answer so you do not have to manually grade the results. Moodle can also grade answers in which students have to type in their answers by looking for specific keywords. Sure, it may be inaccurate but when you have to grade the work of a hundred students, it beats having to visit each and every one of them - and you can re-visit the answers if you have the time or if the students call for a grade appeal. I'm not sure if Moodle supports grade appeals though. I'm guessing it is a manual adjustment that you have to do on paper... or within Excel after exporting the grades. If Moodle's grading is an all-or-nothing, it would have a lot of instructors overloaded with manual grade corrections at the end of a course.

I was wondering if anyone else out there has been on the lookout for forum software. Forums are a great way for open source projects to get people involved in the development and community building, and it shares some of the same values that Xisto does, with the use of the Invision Power Board software.PunBB is quick, easy, and simple to use. The interface is not cluttered at all, and is built for those times when you want something clean, something that is meant to just get the word across. If you want to post to the forum and get help from someone who knows what the configuration settings for apache should be, that's what PunBB excels at. If you want to use PunBB as an alternative to FaceBook, you don't really have all the Polls, fancy image uploads, and all that other forum software would be likely to provide.If you are looking for a PHP-based forum software, go with PunBB if you want to have something that is quick and easy to setup, and runs on a shared web hosting space. If you want to go for something BIG, something with commercial support, and something that is extensible, choose between vbulletin and Invision Power Board (you will get a lot of support on this forum if you decide to go with Invision Power Board). If you want something free, yet of the scale that Invision Power Board goes, choose phpBB (Be warned though, phpBB is harder to extend than any of the other forums).Note: PunBB hasn't had any updates in about 6 months, whereas phpBB is still in active development, whereas vBulletin and IPB are commercial forums that are being actively supported. However, with the simplicity of PunBB, you can take it apart and maintain it yourself, if need be.

If purely scientific evidence is used to prove that one race is better than another, then you cannot really say that it is racist. It is only racist if it is due to a bias. If there is a bias behind saying that one race is superior to another, then the bias does make one racist. It's not like someone is going to get back to you from the dead for presenting scientific evidence.

There are about three possible things that could have the website with those underlined words advertisements. It could be advertisements that the web master put up there intentionally to make some money, firstly. If that is the case, you can probably use an ad blocker to make them go away, though the web master would not be too pleased if you have been the one who has been click on all of the advertisements. Secondly, it could be a toolbar or adware or browser plugin or something that is installed on the computer, in which case you want to try disabling all of the browser plugins, running in safe mode, and check if all of those advertisements still come up. Also check if you have a network proxy or if your Internet Service Provider hands out free connections in exchange for advertising. If you have a free privacy proxy, that could be it because when something is free, that's reason enough to suspect that there could be advertising involved. Since you have already checked out for viruses, there could still be some adware that antivirus software does not classify as malware just yet. Finally, you could simply be running into a cross-site scripting thing where somebody manages to hijack a website to run advertisements in the hope of making some extra cash but without taking in the effort to build a viewership and ethically get advertising revenue from users to their own websites but instead has to steal somebody else's wind and ruin things for other users.

Sheepdog,Perhaps it is a sign. Perhaps you should be giving the pups a wash every single day so that they can look cool no matter when people come in. How about using text messages to remind folk about their appointments? As soon as it's time, if they don't show up, a text message... then, a text message in five minutes, and then a text message every fifteen minutes for the next two hours. Eventually, they would call. You do need to have a way to get the system to know that the folks really did arrive so that it won't send the annoying text messages as a way of getting back at the folk creating the suckfest.Hey, is there any chance that you can train a dog to come barking to you when a car pulls up by the gate? Or perhaps you can put up a door bell. There are remote bells that help get setup quickly, though I don't know how far away they work. It probably works at around fifty to hundred metres, unless they made a cheaper version that runs twenty metres. They remote button unit runs on batteries and the base unit is plugged in. The batteries for the remote would typically run for about a month with regular use, unless you only keep it at the gate for rare occasions. But, better yet, have then call you by phone once they get to the gate so you can head right over and let them in.

Sheepdog,What you have is an upscale-MP3-CD hybrid player. Not too many players include both a CD player and an MP3 player and also toss in an internal storage medium. It is usually just a CD player with a USB port and a slot of memory cards, or just an MP3 player with internal memory that can plug into the USB port of a computer. There is a (Chinese) firm that still makes cassette tape players with a slot for USB and memory cards (looks very vintage), and another firm that makes CD players that look like they could be from the yester-years.I can't imagine why you would have the same CD recorded four times, when you changed the CDs.... unless you have a four-CD changer and you had the first disc still inserted. It would have been really tragic if your second try would have been with four CDs too. If you were to physically remove the first disc from the player, there would be no way for it to make another copy of the first disc. There is a chance that the player is buggy and the folks who created it only tested it with one disc inserted at a time.Either way, it is always easiest to just copy MP3 files to the MP3 players because it makes it so much more intuitive using a computer interface that you have been using time and again, with a keyboard to edit the media information metadata and a mouse to drag and drop. Drag and drop isn't as simple as it should be - multiple windows are rarely visible at the same time unless you have a multi desktop setup with two or more monitors. They ought to figure out something easier.Back in the days of Windows 3.1, most apps were designed to not take up all of the screen space though it was just 640x480 and that seemed fair enough for doing the drag-drop thing. Now, even with 1024x768 and 1366x768, applications tend to take up all of the desktop area and prefer to be maximized.

I have been playing Respawnables for countless hours over the past month. What a way to spend the most festive season of the year, when I could have been out making merry. Respawnables is a game by Zynga, but before you think it is one of those Mafia Wars like thingies, I would like to add that Respawnables is nothing like Mafia Wars, Zombie Wars, those FaceBook Farm thingies, or anything else of their kind. Respawnables is more like Counter Strike. Yes, you heard it right, like Counter Strike. Well, the actual game play is more like Quake because you can re-spawn when you die without having to wait for the next round so, yeah, it is more like Quake than like Counter Strike.There is also the matter of the graphics which are more cartoon-like. I don't mean like Final Fantasy but more like the Incredibles. In fact, one of the characters probably looks like a copy of the guy from the incredibles while the other have the same styling. When you fire a gun, you even have those comics-like callouts that go Rat-a-tat-a-tat or Bang-bang. The game has specific missions that are all based on the death match where you have to make a specific number of kills by a sniper rifle headshot, or where you have to kill a certain number of enemies using exploding barrels, another where you have to go two minutes without making any kills or dying, and another where you have to collect a certain number of badges within forty five seconds.The game play is quite fun. You have to gain points, either by killing other players deathmatch-style or by picking up the badges that players drop when they die. Getting to the top of the leaderboard for that particular game against bots is easy. Getting the mission accomplished can sometimes get tough. Using the grenades is quite a challenge for some folk in just about any kind of first person shooter.The folks at Zynga realised that using the iPhone touch interface to point and shoot is extremely difficult, so the game features auto-aim. You can point your crosshairs anywhere close to the target, and the weapon will aim, moving the crosshairs onto the target. This can get annoying in missions where you are trying to kill an enemy with an exploding barrel, yet your weapon insists on killing with a direct hit. It takes a bit of figuring out, like standing on a corner while the enemy is not visible and timing the shot to the barrel at the precise moment when the enemy would be passing the barrel (you can't see the enemy because you are around the corner). You also have to make sure that you are not too close to the barrel or you may have an "autokill", which is what happens when you kill yourself.Respawnables is free, like many games on the AppStore, and you can make in-app purchases to improve your character. I have not bought anything with the in-app purchases yet and my game is still going strong, so you do not absolutely need the in-app purchases.There was a bug in the game where the game would not register your mission accomplishments, but they fixed one of them and the game does seem to eventually count against the other that I encountered. Bugs do make the gameplay slightly less fun, but hey, this is a free game and Zynga was going through a tough time according to news reports from the start of the year so this may be what can turn the company around and bring them back to profitability so support them by playing Respawnables.

Hi!There is this girl who I know. Well, this post should have come from her but she does not really want to seek advice so I offered to get her the help and advice that she needs.It all started one day when she reached out to me and said, "I am not feeling too good."I replied, "Oh, are you running a temperature? Perhaps the sniffles?"Her response was terse. Only three words, to be more precise. She said, and I quote, "I wanna die"That was accompanies by a sad smiley of this kind: :'(I, being a bit poetic and anti-climatic, took the storm away and was a bit too cliche when I said, "Death is over-rated."But, I did add, "Definitely not something you would want."Her spirits were still down, so she just replied with a, "nope"At least that got the dialogue happening, so I thought I could talk her out of what seemed to be suicidal tendencies. "Trust me... the living have it all," I added. Sure, maybe I sounded lame, but I could not really think of anything else to say at the time."I am in a big problem which am unable to solve," she said.I wanted to know more, I wanted to help if I could, so I asked, "What's the problem like?"I felt the need to say something, but the only words that came out of my mouth were, "There's never been a problem that has been too great for prayers and human effort to conquer."She began recounting her tale with a, "Kind sir, I am a brahmin."For those of you who are not familiar with the Hindu system of classification of societal responsibilities, Brahmins are the highest tier of society and are responsible for offering prayers to God and the demi-Gods. Their role in maintaining civilization is paramount and they keep culture and traditions from fading away.It is actually a kind of a prestige to have been a Brahmin, so I complimented, "That's nice."She could clearly tell that I had no idea whatsoever of where this was going, so she explained, "I am in love with a guy since six years"I sensed that this could be one of the common troubles in Indian society. Boy falls in love with girl, girl falls in love with boy, the society does not accept them because of differences in castes, and there begins the problem. So, I asked, "What caste is he?"She replied with a single word, "Brahmin."To me, it looked like the sky cleared up for her and her boyfriend, so I said, "That should work out well."In India, kids typically seek their parents' blessings before a wedding, and for the little matter of wedding expenses that the parents usually pay for. I asked her, "Did you tell your parents?""No, " she replied, "He told his parents. They did not like me.""They dont want this marriage to happen," she added.That was her tale of sorrow, the one that she was willing to give up her life for, and the one that I said she ought to give it a long thought about. There was the possibility that they could get married without their parents' consent, but it did not seem like they could go through with it. There was the possibility that she could end it with him, and marry somebody that her parents would want her to marry, but it did not seem like she was willing to let go. Then, there was the possibility that she could decide to end it all, leaving behind a note of why she took the extreme measure. In India, people do not typically see a counsellor. Perhaps it's just not something that they do because they are in denial of having a mental condition. But then again, telling that what it is, to create an awareness, would be an insult to their ego because they associate just about anything about a mental condition to being mentally challenged (the exact word that would be ringing through their minds is "retarded"), and there simply isn't enough tolerance for something of the kind for them to want to seek professional assistance. Such is the Indian society, and this is perhaps the reason for the high suicide rate in India.

Agyat,Are you referring to Social Media Optimization? It's usually called Social Media Marketing and is abbreviated to SMM. Organizations spend quite a bit on getting the word out through social media. And it works too. A lot of independent jewellery and clothing designers are getting their work sold through FaceBook alone. They usually create one-of-a-kind work that gets sold through FaceBook, as opposed to the commercial fashion designers who create a design and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of the work floating around in stores worldwide. I wouldn't be surprised if the thousands turned into millions for something that is more popular like, perhaps a pair of sneakers.Social media marketing takes a lot more effort and organizations spend much much more on things such as creating viral videos, copywriting, and ensuring that customer support is on every case that they hear of through their social media channels.

sheepdog,On your Samsung camera, open up the cover that holds the battery. Somewhere in that compartment, there should be a memory card. Push it to partially eject it, and then pull it out. Most cameras have limited on-board storage memory, so there is bound to be a memory card in there somewhere.Speaking of low memory on-board in cameras, I remember a Panasonic Lumix camera that I had stashed in a drawer somewhere that has a twelve megapixel resolution but with only enough space to store about sixteen photographs. Yes, that's right, the camera has a resolution of twelve megapixels, putting it at the top of the camera pyramid, if there ever was a camera pyramid, back in its time yet they only provided enough storage for sixteen photographs. I guess that space too was provided only to be able to demonstrate the features of the camera while at the store. For all practical purposes, it needs a memory card. The same was the case with an old VGA resolution camera that was bundled with the Nokia 9210i Communicator. It could store about sixteen photographs and for anything more, you had to either transfer the photographs via infrared or you had to use a memory card to store the photographs. That camera didn't even have a rechargeable battery and run on two AA-sized batteries, which ran out rather quickly if they were the 1.2V rechargeable batteries - it actually demanded regular 1.5V non-rechargeable alkaline batteries.

Why did you have to get rid of the car? Did you move away? Was it a shortage of spares for regular maintenance? Did you get into an accident? Was it on the demands of the significant other? Was it a rusting body? Do share the story of your Trans Am.

Moodle is an learning management system. You can use it to organize the material that you hand out to a class, to deliver quizzes, and to keep track of grades. Moodle also provides community features for students to discuss in forums.Moodle is a web based system written in PHP. If you would like to install Moodle on a web hosting service, you have to make sure that your web hosting service supports the minimum requirements of the version you are installing. This includes the PHP version of the hosting environment, PHP extensions, and the MySQL database version.Moodle 2.4 requires PHP 5.3.2 and MySQL 5.1.33, as of this writing, is the current version of Moodle. Moodle 2.3.3 has the same requirements of Moodle 2.4. Moodle 2.2.6 can run with MySQL 5.0.25, but also has the requirement of PHP 5.3.2. Moodle 2.1.9 has the same requirements as Moodle 2.2.6. If you are running on a web hosting service that does not meet the minimum requirements for PHP, you can install Moodle 1.9.19, which requires PHP 4.3.0 and MySQL 4.1.16. You can install an unsupported version of Moodle as well, if you want more features but don't have the system requirements to support one of the above-mentioned versions, but you would not get any security updates if any loop holes in the system are discovered. Right now, the free web hosting uses PHP version 5.2.17 so you can either install Moodle 1.9 or the unsupported Moodle 2.0.10. Some tweaks may be needed to deal with any additional requirements of PHP 5.2 (does it need the time zone to be set?) or deprecated features.It is, however, possible to modify Moodle to run on PHP 5.2 by back-porting the parts of Moodle that use the new PHP 5.3 features. It takes a bit of development effort and you would have to back-port any updates made to the version you are forking off as well. With the open-source methodology, you can even re-distribute your fork of Moodle and possibly seek to make a profit by providing your consulting services.

You are probably looking for the term SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and involves building your site in a manner that a search engine can easily index it and determine the context of the content of your page. For example, if you have a heading on your web site, the search engine knows that the page is about the term that you have included within the HTML heading tags. Similarly, if you have applied any kind of emphasis or different formatting to a particular word, that word probably has a greater significance to determining the context of your content. Search engine optimization goes beyond looking at content within a page and also look at the bigger picture - what kind of websites link to you and what do you link to. A lot of factors go into having a search engine determine the context of your page and returning the relevant search results.

Gifts and presents are things that people remember for years and years to come. It serves as an anchor to old memories. People remember the time that you went over to their homes to wish them for their birthdays, the time when you congratulated someone with a card wishing them on their success, or even the time when you got an engagement ring for your spouse! Some people cherish and preserve the gifts that they receive, such as the elderly woman whose husband left her a Rolls Royce and she has had it for over five decades. It reminds her of the time when they were struggling through life to make ends meet when one day her husband decides to surprise her with a new purchase, which was a new Rolls Royce, driven right out of the automobile store. At the moment, she was shocked but now that she thinks back about it, she remembers all the fun times they had when they drove around in what was one of the most luxurious cars available at the time. Children cherish things such as teddy bears, fountain pens, and toys that they grow up with. Gifts serve as a walk to specific moments into the past and brings back pleasant memories extending far far back in one's life.

If I were to visit another country for a holiday, I would go to Thailand. The weather is generally warm and the best time to visit is in February and March. Phuket (an island), and lots of resorts, are all over Thailand. There are plenty of opportunities to go shopping for T-shirts and there's an airport at Bangkok where you can catch a flight to, by Quantas, British Airways, Eva Air, or Thai Airways (BTW, that hole in the fuselage of a Quantas flight was just a one-off occurrence - it most likely would not happen again after they have experienced it once because they would be taking precautions). There are package tours from a firm named Tropical Locations that can make all of your travel arrangements, if you are interested. Oh, and if you've never seen cable cars before, Bangkok is the place to check it out - that's the most vivid memory I have of my trip to Bangkok way back in the early 1990s.Also a part of Thailand are lots of Buddhist temples, the Thai sea food, and lots and lots of opportunities to experience the rich culture and music at Thailand. If you do have the time, you can also check out the central plains of Thailand, which are called the Rice Bowl of Asia (makes you wish you could work those chopsticks, doesn't it?).

I just wanted to add that the Mayan calendar ends tomorrow. No big deal. My calendar ends on 21st December every year and you don't see people making a big fuss about it. They probably just figured out that the millions of dollars that a museum used to acquire a relict of the Mayan calendar becomes obsolete tomorrow, so they have to go find a new antique clock, just as I have to get out there and get a new calendar that starts with January 1, 2013.So, who has got the 2013 calendars already? I'm pretty sure the newspaper agencies and other firms that want to send out promotional material have calendars and diaries to send out, already prepped up to send out for Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve.

This thread seems to be new because I remember posting about my first cellular mobile phone. There was another thread about first mobile phones too. In either case, let me add to this thread my glorious collection of mobile phones.The first phone that I used was a Nokia 2050. I still have it and it works if you keep it connected to the wall socket - the battery holds just enough charge for a few minutes. If they had used capacitors instead of batteries, it would perhaps still be working, but the technology back then to produce a high capacity capacitor simply did not exist. Even today, capacitors are rarely used when a high battery capacity is desired, with manufacturers turning to Lithium Ion batteries. Back then, it was Nickel Cadmium or Nickel Metal Hydride batteries. The Nokia 2050 also had a rather large screen and it is rather comfortable to read text messages on that screen when compared to the mobile phones of today, barring the smart phones that have a full-sized touch interface. The Nokia 2050 did suffer from a bout of a lack of microphone function, which seemed to correct itself after a week of leaving it alone. It may have been dust or something of the sort but it only occurred once and since the problem fixed itself, so to speak, I never really had any complaints about the Nokia 2050.The Nokia 6110 was my next mobile phone and it was very popular back then. Pretty much everybody had either the Nokia 6110 or an Ericsson (can't remember the model number of the Ericsson; this was before Ericsson had the joint venture with Sony for manufacturing mobile phones). There was not really much to say about the Nokia 6110 other than the popular Snake game that was included and an infrared transceiver on the front of the device. The Nokia 6210 was quite similar to the Nokia 6110 except for the lack of an antenna.After the Nokia 6110 and Nokia 6210, I had a Siemens C35i, which lasted a long long time till it would hang or lose signal. The Siemens C35i was built to be light and was perhaps one of the last phones to have an antenna because the later generations of phones. did not have any visible antenna. Several phones (Nokia 9210i Communicator, Nokia 2600, Nokia E72) later, I settled on the Nokia N9 and the Apple iPhone 4S.

Tinoymalayil,When you mentioned about the integrated development environment (IDE) included with the Python that you downloaded from the Python.com website (do you mean Python.org?), are you referring to the IDLE development environment? It is quite useful when learning Python and it feels a lot like GW-BASIC from the yesteryears. Anyway, I hope you have fun coding Python. There is definitely lots that you can do with it.

You seem to be the ambassador of the Axe Effect You don't happen to use the Axe deo, do you? I think it has a lot to do with your personality and looks.