TronDD

I hate this state. Trying to get a place in NH but the property tax would kill me. And I work is MA so I'd still have to pay MA income tax. Houston, huh?

I don't think the government should be selling the organs and "donating" the money to the victim. The victim should get ownership of the body. They can choose to sell the organs if they want.

Here's that one told entirely in the medium of Lego The Brick Testament

Pimsleur has it's place for pronunciation and vocabulary, but I highly discourage using it to really learn the language. It falls far short of teaching grammar, the building blocks of a language. I listened to the first 5 minutes of Pimsleur's Japanese course. It said "Watashi means I but when used in a sentence it's pronounced watashiwa" That statement is completely incorrect and will only confuse a student later on when they hear 'watashi ga', for example. I've seen people who have gone through most of the Pimsleur tapes asking very basic grammatical questions. When I was studying Russian, I was told many times to avoid Pimsleur, and I did. It wasn't until a couple years later, studying Japanese, that I listened to some Pimsleur and realized how right they were. I still say Pimsleur has it's place, but to really study a language, start with the building blocks. Get yourself a good grammar book. If possible, find a forum with other students of the language. What launguage do you have in mind?

The 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers Here's a couple of choice quotes: "For years, the Caterpillar Company has provided Israel with the bulldozers used to destroy Palestinian homes...Peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by a Caterpillar D-9, military bulldozer in 2003. She was run over while attempting to block the destruction a family's home in Gaza. Her family filed suit against Caterpillar in March 2005 charging that Caterpillar knowingly sold machines used to violate human rights." "Dow Chemical has been destroying lives and poisoning the planet for decades. The company is best known for the ravages and health disaster for millions of Vietnamese and U.S. Veterans caused by its lethal Vietnam War defoliant, Agent Orange. Dow also developed and perfected Napalm, a brutal chemical weapon that burned many innocents to death in Vietnam and other wars." "Among automakers, Ford Motor Company is the worst. Every year since 1999, the US Environmental Protection Agency has ranked Ford cars, trucks and SUVs as having the worst overall fuel economy of any American automaker." And my favorite: "Pfizer is the largest pharmaceutical company in the world; it is also one of the worst abusers of the human right of universal access to HIV/AIDS medicine."

I started with BASIC, then Pascal in high school. Then to C, C++, Java, Scheme, and some made up assembly language. Finally PERL which I use the most as it is quick and easy and very powerful with string manipulation. You've already picked Python, nothing wrong with that. I think what is important is to learn how to think like a programmer, being able to follow the flow of an algorithm with conditionals and function calls and understanding what is happening to the data as it travels a path of the program. Any language can help teach you that, everything else is syntax.

Both lists are pretty ridiculous. If you are going to judge me by the thread count of my sheets, get out of my house. Not interested. If you try to impress me with an Eminem CD, a business card, and beer, not interested. If you have a pile of condoms on your night stand, adios. The male list does have a point about decent clothes (I'd stop well short of $150 jeans and $200 shoes, though) and a clean house but that's just general advice, really.

Well I suffer from the same deal. I won't open the door on Halloween. Or any other time, really. People scare the crap out of me. Best I can do is sympathize with you. Tim.

Are you planning any kind of package managment? I always hated binary packages. Gentoo saved linux for me. Something like portage would be nice. Or, I'd port portage myself. That would mean I'd need Python on your OS. Though, if I had to pick one, I'd prefer PERL. What about server software? Apache, ssh, vnc, samba and network tools like nmap, and firewall configuration utilities (I use Shorewall).

Jon P, what problem are your actually asking for advice about? Just a fear of distributing candy to a large number of children wearing costumes on your doorstep or something more general? Fear of people, social interaction, large groups, being the center of attention, living up to expectations, performing infront of others, and probably some more stuff that your example could cover. Tim.

I think that's great. If there were neighborhoods that banned children, that's where I'd live. I'm sure this guy is going to take a lot of flack for it because we all need to help out families for the good of society, right? Children are the future and all that. Since, who else can we steal from to take care of us when were old?

Here's my view on casual sex, which may not be very objective as there are many things that influence my opinion on this: If you're having sex without being in a loving relationship with the people, what will the person you do love think of the sexual activities they (supposidly) earned from you? If the US mint started printing off $100 bills and handing them out to anyone that came along, what would 100 US Dollars be worth? Nothing. In my opinion, that level of intamacy is something you earn from eachother. If it's given away, it's worthless.

Exactly. If the government has no power to help any specific person or group of people, what would buying a politician gain you? What about a judge, though? What keeps their decisions unbiased and rational? Or does the appeal process provide the necessary check to a crooked judge?

Favorite window manager is Fluxbox (used to be blackbox). It's quite minimalist. No icons, just a right click menu to launch applications and a task bar to show what's running. Customizable enough to make it very minimal or very functional (in my opinion). I even use BB4win (blackbox for Windows) on my windows PCs at home and at work. Typical internet apps like Firefox, Thunderbird (or Sylpheed which I like better but couldn't get unicode to work), and gaim. Gimp for graphics. Screen for use when accessing remotely. It allows multiple terminals in one connection and you can detach from a session and it'll keep doing what it was doing and then you can reattach later. A very nice utility. Check it out if you haven't heard of it.

No, not really. I was responding in more of a "what if" fashion. If government education resulted in a more educated populace, it still wouldn't be a good end nor would it justify the coersive means. I was refering to the scenario presented by valjean of an "excellent public university" and "top-notch education."

You're not looking at the total end. Yes, a government that takes taxes through coersion to pay for education can create a better educated population, but that means has also created theft, and loss of rights for everybody. Once those well educated people start working, they'll bet stolen from, too. Unjust means result in undjust ends.

There was an interesting short story I read in high school titled "Rape Fantasies". It was about a group of women sitting around telling eachother these romantisized dreams of being "raped." I assume those stories are similar to what can be found in some of these romance novels (never read a word of one, so I don't know). One of the charaters points out that their stories are not rape but sex with a stranger and "rape is when you don't want to." Nice, found a link: http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-me...d1191-des-.html

I don't think anyone has mentioned Great Teacher Onizuka. A funny and heartwarming series. Onizuka is a rebelious type of guy who wants to be come a teacher, originally, to be around 16 year old girls. He ends up teaching the "problem" class in a junior high and is able to win them over because he refuses to give up on them and consider them garbage like the other faculty have. A few of my favorite shows are: Gunslinger Girls - An interesting illustration of emotion and ethics. Young girls who, for one reason or another, are abandoned or near death, are "saved" by a secret government group that rebuilds their bodies with artificial parts, "conditions" their minds so they will work willingly and then use them as assassins. You see what it is these girls go through and how they say they feel about it and it makes you wonder if they were better off dying or not. Elfen Lied - This show has a lot of nudity and gory violence. People with extreme physical power vs. normal people. Who are the monsters? That's what I got out of that series, anyway. Now and Then, Here and There - A young boy, Shu, get's pulled into another world where a crazy dictator is trying to conquer the world. Horrible things happen to people. There is also a being, Lalaru, who can conjure water from her pendant. Water is needed, not only for the people, but to power the war machine. They try to force Lalaru to give them water. The series is a good illustration of corrupt power, exploitation of those who are productive, and that, despite the bad events in history, people are generally good. "Because ten billion years time is so fragile, so ephemeral... it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness."

I have a pair, great for cancelling out the nonsensical ramblings of your insane family.

Read the manga. That "communist utopia" was described as "A zoo for those wierd animals that build their own cages and hide inside of them." I always liked that line. The only way the "utopia" could work is if humans were "stabalized", ie. no longer human. And Ghia, the computer setup to protect Man from the bioroids, knew that was wrong and tried to destroy the bioroids. There is no bioroid virus or whatever it was, in the manga story. The manga is far superior to the movie. Ghost in the Shell is a great series. Written by the same author as Appleseed. I don't care for the GitS movies much, either. But the manga and the series are amazing. Also interesting are the works of Mohiro Kiho. Narutaro (aka Shadow Star) is an interesting look at psycology. What would children do with limitless power? The anime series only covers the first half of the manga story so I don't know how it ends yet (manga translations have been extremely slow). The anime was really good but Kito doesn't pull any punches with graphic violence. It contains some of the most horrific scenes I've ever seen. And that was after it was toned down for TV. Whether I can agree with a story's philosophy or not, I like when they at least give you something to think about.

I'd like to recommend Kino's Journey It's a collection of loosely tied together short stories that covers a lot of philosophy and sociology and the like. There is a good episode that illustrates how free a Democracy can be, too. Interesting stuff. I'd have other recomendations as I'm a big anime fan, but this one is at least somewhat relevant to this site. Tim.