Brainteaserfan

Refer to Marat's post. They were at war for quite some time, now they are not necessarily. Saying that Islam preaches fellowship with Christanity doesn't mean that they always did.

Oh. My mistake. I didn't realize that that was referring to his post.

There seem, IMO, divided opinions and Quran texts on relation with Jesus. I'm not sure that Islam today all preaches fellowship either.

Всем привет, подскажите пож-та где можно скачать Photoshop последней версии с ключом. Всё обычскал.

Спасибо

Google translate:

Hello, tell me that AMP-where you can download the latest version of Photoshop with a key. All obychskal. Thanks

Huh????? Biology???

C'mon, Islam fought the Crusaders for hundred of years. The only reason you hear talk resembling what you say is because they have mostly reconciled and try to cover it up. Mohammed is at least as guilty, was easily arguably the instigator, and went on quite a rampage unchecked before the Crusaders got really organized about fighting back, IIRC. Its all history, hundreds of years, like 650 - through the 1100's-1300's or so. It's all history. Why lie? Sooner or later, warring peoples reconcile, but why lie?

When did they lie?

The ancients would lay siege to foreign battlements for years for gain and you can’t see them putting a miracle worker in jail to cool his heals and soften up to do a few miracles for their gain.

 

Oh well.

 

Regards

 

DL

Yet, if Jesus didn't do many miracles for those in power (I can't think of one), then why would they have wanted to pay for his jail if they saw him as a possible fraud? Most of the people wanted to kill him too, as he went against the established customs and thought.

 

No scientist would die for an un-proven theory yet those of faith say they would for their un-proven theories.

 

 

He spoke of Christians. Not Jesus.

We both know that anyone in power at the time who thought they actually had a miracle worker in hand, would have capitalized on him. Not kill him.

 

Regards

DL

A theory cannot be proven, only supported.

How could those in power have capitalized upon Jesus (if He was truly a miracle worker and divine)? Clearly, Jesus wasn't willing to be "capitalized upon" in a earthly sense. If He was divine, He wouldn't let anyone capitalize on Him.

I'm not sure I follow how devaluations are essentially defaults. A default, by definition, requires that the government be unable to pay back its debts; a devaluation is simply a way for the government to create a "discount" while it pays back said debts. A default is an order of magnitude more serious than a devaluation.

 

And Greece could afford to pay higher interest rates on its debt without substantial welfare cuts and government restructuring?

Not always unable, but failure to repay the debt.

Somewhere in the Bible we are warned that the Devil may sometimes speak to us in the persona of an angel, and we know as well from the Old Testament that the pagan magicians who displayed their miracles in opposition to Moses before the Pharoh were able to achieve stunning feats. Putting these 'Biblical facts' together, we are led to the conclusion that both inner promptings of self-certain belief ('I know Jesus lives because he is in my heart!') and external miracles (raising the dead, turning a staff into a snake) are unreliable evidence as to whether the source of this magic or inspiration is human, divine, or diabolical. So why would God/Christ try to impress us with these devices which his supposed text warns us against accepting as reliable evidence?

 

Raising the dead is often associated with the black arts rather than religion, and the Devil himself promises somewhere in the Bible, just as does Christ, that 'Thou shalt not surely die' (i.e., there will be everlasting life posthumously). But this seems suspicious right away, that both the embodiment of Good and Evil are making the same promise. The Christian Church has for many years forbidden or discouraged all forms of necromancy, so the fact that Christ seeks to prove his own divinity, not by pulling a rabbit out of his hat, but by pulling himself out of the grave ('ta-daah!') seems inconsistent with the anti-necromantic stance of his religion.

 

Interesting. I don't remember having read that. Could we know where those, "somewheres", are?

I think that the discouragement of the necromancy is that we are not supposed to work miracles through the Devil's power, but through God's power.

 

 

This speaks quite well to your logical fallacy.

 

Come back, if you understand it, wit a reasonable set of questions and not some wish list you want from science when your wish list for God does not hold the same conditions you place on us.

 

That is not fair play at all.

 

Regards

 

DL

I don't have time to debate every issue brought up, however, I disagree even with the last sentence, about how creationists believe that something came from nothing. If God exists, He is not, "nothing".

Do you, or do you not believe in GOD? This is a rational question besetting us "ALL". Me, I am an Agnostic for only one reason. If GOD exists, I don't want him to forget that I was here too. If he is not, it really doesn't matter, does it? If there is no GOD, then there will definately be no DEVIL, right? So, just conduct yourself in a descent, moral manner and "PRAY" that neither side is wrong.

That was not the question asked by the topic. How does your post relate to mine?

The usual story that capitalists would like you to believe is that the Greeks are fat and lazy and don't pay their taxes, so as a result they got their economy in a mess, and now the hard-working part of Europe is sick of bailing them out, so the Greeks have to endure the cruelties of government belt-tightening to get their debt under control.

 

But if you look at the percentage of the GDP that the Greek government collects in taxes, you will see that they take in about 33%, which is a much higher collection of taxes than the U.S. government at all levels has at a mere 26.9%. So the Greek tax income is adequate, and so this cannot be blamed for its debt crisis.

 

In essence, what is happening now is that the people who make their incomes by risking their cash in loaning it out to people on interest -- the banks and speculators -- now don't want to pay the price that they ought to pay for having made a bad gamble on Greece. Having to pay for making the occasional bad loan decision is the fair social cost of the high interest income that banks and speculators make from loaning their money successfully in most cases. But of course, since this is a loss for capitalists we are now talking about, governments, the media, and other capitalists are getting together to insist that they should not have to pay for their gambles when they go bad, but that instead the pain should be shifted to the debtors, in this case the Greek people. The upshot is that to save the loan investments of French and German bankers and speculators, the Greek people will be made to endure unemployment, cruel adjustments in welfare, and cutting of humane social services.

Just because the government takes in more than the US (who need to do something too about their debt), doesn't mean that they are doing their share. If they give back welfare and the like, (back to those who paid taxes), then that is not really a fair tax estimate.

It seems the height of absurdity to say that only if you believe in a fairy tale can you find sufficient motivation to treat your fellow humans decently, which is what morality is all about. Unless you treat other people decently for the intrinsic goodness of respecting other people, you are essentially psychopathic, since you don't understand the value of moral behavior in itself, since you have to support it by something alien to it, like an imaginary story about a mind-reading giant in the sky who will burn you in a cosmic frying-pan after you're dead unless you're nice on earth. Someone who is 'moral' for that reason is not really moral at all, but just prudent, acting to his own long-term self-advantage. So belief in God and heavenly rewards for being good, instead of promoting morality, actually makes morality impossible, since believers could always be being good just for the reward, which is about as moral as a trained seal leaping out of the water to get a fish.

You have probably heard of the prisoner's dilemma and know what you should do. Sort of like that, without religion, if you were intelligent, you'd probably be better off if you were just slightly dishonest in everything that you did.

One of the major differences between a fairy tale and the Bible is that the vast majority of fairy tales do not tell you to do much.

Actually, it isn't illegal to recieve an illegal attachment as you have no control over it (thats a bit like saying it's illegal to be stabbed)

 

and like the stabbing scenario, there are laws being broken but not by the victim.

 

however, if you keep the illegal attachment for longer than it takes to go 'oh thats not good, delete' or inform the authorities about the person sending the illegal material. then you're commiting the offence of possessing the illegal material.

 

sending illegal material to the white house would be a bad idea, there will usually be enough information to trace the source of the material back to yourself, which will happen. and regardless of the legality of receiving the material, sending it is as sending implies possesion. of course there are exceptions when malware is involved as it is possible the sender is unaware their account is sending such material.

 

either way, the law is not as ridiculously incompetent as you seem to think it is

I have no evidence to support this, but I had heard that if you received a lewd photo via text msg, then you were in some kind of trouble. (sorry if I'm totally wrong, I did do some googling, but got totally unrelated results.) Wouldn't this tend to apply to email as well (if true)?

Yes, I realize that a court would probably find the WH cleared and the sender in huge trouble due to common sense. However, just like in computer code, the more of it, the more loopholes. That is why we use, or at least, should use, common sense in all court decisions IMO.

How would anyone know whether you had deleted or copied the email attachments, and what is "longer than it takes to go 'oh thats not good, delete'"?

Almost everything important and scientifically true is general. The basic laws of physics, for example, were not found by searching through the Amazon Rain Forest to uncover some secret stone with magical properties which revealed them, but rather, by carefully analyzing and measuring large ranges of superficial data and then drawing the best inferences to account for them. Similarly, ethical and psychological principles are normally developed by gaining lots of experience about people and then deriving a few principles which serve as useful guides for treating others well and empathizing with them.

 

But the whole problem with the literalist approach to the significance of one person who lived at one time and in one place is that it pretends that the meaning of the entire universe can be derived from what a single entity is reported to have said and done. Thus the meaning of the entire system is focused just in one tiny point within the system, which is not characteristic of any sort of systematic explanation elsewhere in our experience. Peano's axioms explaining math don't concentrate on discovering the meaning of number by finding the special, magically informative number, say 1139, which reveals all.

 

Rational insight simply doesn't work this way -- or rather, it does, but only in fairy tales, where the Wizard of Oz, the golden fleece, the sword in the stone, the holy grail, the wise centaur Silenus, etc., will explain or solve everything, if it can only be discovered. Such a solution to the mysteries of life is characteristically literary, since it defines a simple quest for the story's narrative, concretizes and unifies the solution of the action, and dramatizes the conclusion. That the whole answer to all the vast and terrible mysteries of life and the universe should be in a single carpenter who spoke Aramaic in the Roman Province of Judea ca. 30 A.D. seems palpably fictional and rationally disproportionate. How can a single fact account for everything?

Is the Bible a single fact? Does the Bible explain everything? Maybe as well as my explanation, (everything happens for a reason; sometimes that reason is chance).

As far as I know, it is illegal to receive an illegal attachment or email in america. So, could one email something illegal to the white house? Even better, could I write something, copyright it, and then have my sister email it, and then only prosecute the recipient?

Note: I'm not by any means suggesting that someone do this, I'm just wondering if it would, theoretically, work.

The latter fact, if true, seems more likely to be a proof for devil-worship than for Christianity.

Why?

I long ago came to realise that the traditional Left/Right political spectum is wrong.

 

The true political spectrum has Statism (Gov controls everything) at one end and Anerchy (Gov controls nothing) at the other.

 

From this POV political parties in Democracies generally fall in the centre of spectrum with the "Traditional Left" being slightly more "Statist" than the "Traditional Right". This also puts both the "extreme" left and right exactly where they belong, side by side and well up the road to "Statism".

 

When viewed from this POV a lot of the seeming contradictions disappear and the similarities between the two major sides becomes apparent. They are similar because they are fighting for the support of the same people, that band in the middle who want some, but not total, government control.

Not all laws deal with govermental control. For instance, if a party wants to pass a prochoice law, which side of the political spectrum does that push the party toward? That is why, IMO, it is not two dimensional.

And we farmers will just magic up crops through the pavement, eh?

Maybe we could grow crops on the roof, so that in essence we'd be living underground.

I don't want to live that way either. Dekan, we are a long way from that. I don't think that we are much closer to that now that we were 1000 years ago. Science may be leading us that way, but it will take years just for a world population to be that large. And, when the population grows, there will be more wars. Our extended family has a shared country vacation home. If it was in the middle of a city, we would never travel there.

Uh, the oil price is dependent on market speculations in Western countries.

 

The East doesn't ask for the West's interference. It's funny how the petrol price really started spiking with the West's economic meltdown and the invasion of Iraq.

 

My friend's mom recently traveled to Qatar, where she said the petrol price is about 2 Rand a liter, that's roughly 5 times cheaper than it currently is here in South Africa.

 

How is the West helping people reach democracy in a swifter fashion? Somalia has failed after US intervention, (Ok, technically not East, but still). Iraq and Afghanistan are still in shambles, even after the murder of their dictators, North Korea is still giving you the middle finger. Egypt's revolution was over in what, like one or two months? That was without Western intervention. Libya on the other hand, with American bombs trashing up the place is still fighting.

 

Nine times out of ten, people don't want Western intervention. Especially if that intervention comes in the form of smart bombs and tanks.

 

But I digress. The oil price is fairly constant in Eastern countries, it's just that as soon as there is some trouble, the stock markets all over the world go crazy and artificially inflate the oil price. The greed of the West is the only thing shooting it in the foot.

Generally I agree, but in Libya, the rebels did ask for our help. I guess that was the 1 in 10. They couldn't lower the price of oil, because they were fighting those who controlled the oil.

How many Jesus literalists are active on this site?

How do you want an answer?

I suppose you could count me as one, although I do think that a few of the sections of the Bible are figurative.

None of the statements you have made are correct in the way in which you mean them. Whatever you have read or were told that led you to believe these statements are true was either badly presented, also wrong, or badly misinterpreted. It would be helpful to other members and casual readers if you verified your statements before posting.

 

1. You are correct that one form of hydrogen fusion is a chain reaction, but you imply by this - borrowing from popular lexicology - that it is a run-away chain reaction. Such is decidedly not the case. Even with the conditions deep within the sun, creation of two protons to deuterium, the first step in the reaction, is so rare half the hydrogen in the sun will still be unconverted 5 billion years from now.

2. Conditions to produce fusion into the higher atomic weight elements are not present within the design of any proposed fusion reactor. Further, as a minor detail, the progress towards iron is associated with supernovae, not novae - an entirely different beast.

3. Which is why the tokamak reactors contain the reaction in a magnetic field.

4. Wow! The atmosphere and the Earth's magnetic field are two completely different things. The magnetic field does protect the atmosphere from some very slow erosional effects of the solar wind, but is not what keeps it from collapsing. The core of the planets is already polarised, hence the magnetic field.

 

 

Edit: the following was added as a separate post after noting stringjunky's observations.

 

 

I believe the primary intention of a nuclear bomb is that people should be scared of its effects. Otherwise it's not of much use. Tell me, are you not somewhat scared of its effects? And if not, why not?

 

 

You don't think safety considerations, real or imagined, have had a part to play?

I was talking about the bomb's first test. Yes, if a bomb was dropped anywhere near me, or anywhere where it might cause a nuclear war, I'd be worried.

I think that the safety considerations are imagined. A death by nuclear radiation sounds terrible, and it is, but it is also exceedingly rare. Nuclear is one of the safest ways that we know of to produce power. Some countries are not suited for it though, (if they are situated where earthquakes or other natural disasters occur relatively frequently.) Much of the US is perfect for it.

I just read this comprehensive article on the future of fusion energy which leads me to believe that it is probably not so far off after all. The rest of the world seems to have made great strides in the industry and based on what I read in this article, it sounds like it is approaching the status of being a workable, efficient (enough), practical endeavor. I just wish that I had not used such a closed-minded title for this thread.

 

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-perspective-future-fusion.html

Even if fusion becomes practical, I don't think that that will be enough to "save" nuclear power. Nuclear power plant construction has almost stopped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_Power_History.png

It seems to be a two large groups of people who claim to support the population but claim the other side is biased against the population, it's very frustrating, is my perception closer to the truth or is it more of one side is correct and the other wrong depending on if you are rich or poor or some other perceptual bias?

Yup, they are like that.

Both, IMO. It isn't just right and left, rich and poor, religious and non-religious etc, it's at least 3 dimensional. Neither party will fit into your beliefs, and even if you may agree more overall with one party, you may feel strongly about 1 particular issue, (ie power sources, abortion) and thus vote differently. If a poll is taken that says that 99.99% of the population supports something, a candidate that supports that issue may find himself not liked, even though he has one thing that people support.

The percent of unmarried couples in the US has been steadily increasing for years. IMO, this is due to the fact that some newer laws and private funds/organizations have begun to discourage marriage. What I mean by this is that, in my family at least, my dad worked 5 days a week, and my mom 1 day. If they weren't officially married, my dad, (if he had no morals), could have bought a vacation apartment in a different state, live there for a couple weeks each year (with us), and claim residency there. However, he could really live with my mom, who would claim residency in our true state. Then, the money that my mom made, being a small sum, would qualify for many forms of welfare, including food for most of the week (I have seen many people receive this), and probably scholarships/financial assistance for my, my brother's and my sister's college. So, what I'm wondering is whether others in this forum view this as a problem, and if so, why?

The fact that the majority of the members of the U.S. Senate are millionaires while the average working American earns about $40,000 a year already makes that body profoundly far removed from popular influence, since the intellectual ideology, conditioned by personal experience, which guides its members is totally alien to the majority of the people. There is already more than enough control on populism in the American political system with money having a major vote in elections alongside real humans.

 

Canada has a much less populist Senate than the United States does, with its Senators appointed until mandatory retirement at 75 by the Prime Minister from among his old cronies, political hacks, party bagmen, and former elected officials who proved so corrupt that they could no longer be elected to office and so had to get a Senate appointment to pay the rent. But even though the Senate is more far removed from popular control than the corresponding U.S. institution, Canada is a much more populist country in its social policies (free healthcare, generous welfare benefits, etc.) than the U.S. That suggests that the populist nature of a country has more to do with the basic assumptions and ideologies of the people rather than with its formal political institutions.

In the DC area, you qualify for many financial support funds if you make less than $50,000. The cost of living is pretty high. That is not to say though that I agree with the amount that they are paid though, just that it's not as bad as it sounds.

My nephew brought to my attention that he gets electric shocks when climbs off his trampoline. This is new knowledge to me as I would have thought the metal frame and metal springs would automatically discharge the static to the ground as it was created by him slightly rubbing his feet against the fabric with each jump. Is it wearing shoes that causes the static around his built up around his body to be isolated from the trampoline preventing it being discharged through it...would bare feet negate it? I'm interested in the physics and also by what method/equipment it can be avoided or reduced.

Sounds like you have a hypothesis. Why not carry out the experiment. Have your nephew jump with bare feet, say 200 times, and then ask him if he gets an electric shock.

If you can somehow get the voltage from static electricity and create electricity with it then (approx 1/2 volt per (25nm by 200nm)) then the work to create the static electricity would be less than the output. And there's your perpetual energy source.

I don't envision that producing much electricity, and I don't think that that is quite a perpetual motion machine. This is what I had heard as the definition:

perpetual motion

n.

The hypothetical continuous operation of an isolated mechanical device or other closed system without a sustaining energy source.