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th3ranger

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Everything posted by th3ranger

  1. I understand this an academic discussion, but I have doubts over whether this relates to reality. How many decimal places do you need before the data becomes meaningless? Would an engineer when measuring something differentiate between .99999999... and 1? Are there very many things that matter in measurement down to the millionth of any normal measuring unit? I have difficulty imagining it mattering a whole lot unless you were talking about light-years and/or the speed of light. Let me tell ya, .9999999999c is tons faster than .9c, at least if you want to get across the galaxy within your lifetime or not...
  2. Here are some good podcasts: This Week In Tech (TWIT) Hosted by Leo Laporte from Tech TV weekly CarCast: All about high performance cars hosted by Adam Carolla sporadic The CATO institute Event podcast: While libertarian, still many very interesting and thought provoking topics. multiple times a week The Penny Arcade Podcast: Video games and pop culture, very funny. An audio recording of Tycho and Gabe making their famous comic. sporadic SModcast: Keven Smith and Scott Moser speak about random topics, always very very funny. You will be laughing out loud to this one. sporadic The Onion Radio News: two minute fake news headlines daily Stuff you missed in history Class: except for the last 5 which featured douchbag Jimmy Carter, A fascinating story about the life of someone you might not know from the pages of history. multiple times a week
  3. Actually Europe has been loosing population for years now. this isn't really that surprising. I think that the birth rate in the USA is a bit higher than that.
  4. Don't worry guys the US military takes care of disabled soldiers/sailors/marines/airmen. I'm sure he'll get unlimited poor VA health care for the rest of his life, as well as his whole paycheck if not more. He'll be fine financially I suspect.
  5. AM radio tower destroyed for being "dangerous" I'm not even going to list the number of ways this is stupid. Does anyone think that anyone in Washington state will actually do anything shut these morons down? I doubt it somehow.
  6. I live relatively nearby in Charleston, I have not heard about these crowds. Why exactly are large groups of people gathering in downtown Greenville? What have they been doing that prompted this? I read the link you made but I could not find the whole story. Has this been going on for a long time? What started it? Could you tell us what exactly has been going on?
  7. I realized minutes after posting that if flickr wanted to remove the photo, whatever the reasons, they are completely within their rights to do so. To me though, it just seems wrong somehow that the original (or at least the most well known) image critical of Obama and the mystical image he is trying to maintain just gets shut down as well as the account it was on. Now, a popular image, once let loose on the Internet, is completely impossible to stop, but shutting down the original creator's account on flickr (oh btw I do realize this is not the altered "socialism" image) goes a long, long, way in maintaining the level of fear businesses have of the Obama administration, and of the media in general of criticizing his policies. I guess I reacted to this seeming censorship (though it may very well not be) like I knew facts that I have no reason to suspect. I'm just waiting, waiting, to catch the moment that this is no longer a free country so I may plan accordingly. I've been expecting the first real censorship to be handed down from on high any day now, although I imagine, realistically, if done effectively, I should never know about it, but being new at it, it also occurs to me that Obama's henchmen might not completely blackout a story so well. So! false alarm for now, but I would not put something like this past the looters.
  8. Sorry? That's where I read the article. Did you want me to remove the link? Just make it a credit-less article written by no one? spelling edit
  9. Just like how newspapers and cable news channels are private? Excuse me does the First amendment say only "public companies" have to allow free speech? The question you have to ask yourself is "Did Flickr choose to remove the image freely because of controversy, or did someone in power lean on them a bit now that they knew who's account to end?" If you would persist in this statement, it might pay to note that Flickr is owned by Yahoo, a company currently on the ropes. As it just so happens, Yahoo makes money by selling ads. Content that draws attention makes Yahoo money. Controversial content especially makes Yahoo money. So Yahoo, would end content that makes money, voluntarily? Perhaps you could also ask yourself "Does the Obama administration have a history of pushing private businesses around like they own them?" Maybe you might even go a bit more basic and ask yourself "Does this government respect property rights really at all?" Honestly, if this picture wasn't so political, I would assume like you are.
  10. hahahahaha......oooh not a good sign.
  11. The exercise here for me was to imagine how and why government roads are bad, and view them in such a way that I am able to see them in as bad a light as government health care. Government run highways never have seemed all that bad having grown up around them, and I now, of course, know they must be bad in principle, but I could not conceptualize how. I do not ask why everyone accepts government run roads, because they have never been any other way for me, and I believe most readers as well, so it is very difficult to see what is so wrong about them, let alone reject them wholly as they should be.
  12. Tell me, would you take a hot meal cold at any restaurant? Would you be ok with you, if you bought a brand new car with rust all over? If you purchased a freezer at Best Buy, would forty degrees Fahrenheit be cold enough performance? Would you ever be satisfied with electricity that only worked half the time? No? Then why in the heck does anyone accept the many short comings of the national highway system? Have you seen these various signs of gov't run road system: Pot holes that stay for months- or years And when holes are patched or repaved the repair job is truly terrible Poorly designed exits/entrances Traffic jams that occur in the same place for decades without out anything being done Poorly run toll booths Low speed limits Bearly visible lines for years before being repainted Poorly lit Choked with freight that should be on the rails if it also wasn't gov't run Cops that treat tickets like a source of income for the local gov't (because it is) I think we all know that these things would never be tolerated if you could take your business elsewhere, or if paying for this shit was voluntary. The ubiquitous traffic jams the reader sees everyday are a sign of over-reliance on gov't run and paid for national and local highway systems. What would have taken the place of such a transportation system had the gov't not interfered? I got some ideas for starters! Someone please tell me why in the hell can I beat an AMTRAK train from Charleston to Charleston at 1/30th the cost in 1/5th the time in a car? Something is seriously wrong when a car can beat a train that has no reason to stop and no reason to go slower than 150mph all the way there! Maybe if train cargo was cheaper our roads wouldn't be choked with eighteen-wheelers! One has to wonder what other forms of transportation would have been developed had the national highway system hadn't been there to crush it? How many jobs would have been created? How many lives saved by safer roads? What kind of cars would we be driving had so many CAFE standards not been enacted? Although rarely recognized, the government highway system is a robbery perpetrated on the American people in which 40,000 lives and billions of dollars are wasted every year. How many more years should such a simple job be done so poorly on our dime?
  13. You can't see it? I guess the link didn't work. I'll post another.
  14. Greetings komrades! First I would like to mention that if you are looking for a good copy of the Obama/joker poster, I have it saved on my computer and I will put it at the end of my post. This week we have witnessed the anger of common citizens over the health care bill and it's blatant violation of our rights. Representatives and Senators have suddenly stopped answering questions or even having a town meeting at all! There are cases of town halls' audience's being stacked in favor of health care before anyone else can enter. One would question the point of even bothering to have a town hall meeting of people that agree with you, but that is apparently the state of politics today. What's especially strange about this all is the looter's insistence that all the protests are fake. Why would it even matter if all the protests are "AstroTurf?" Is it no longer permissible to protest in this country? Is assembling in large numbers over some issue wrong now? This is very close to an attempt to shut down free speech. I would say this is normal and expected, but this is not an election year. This is very, very, scary. I have some reasons why I think that this could be politically, a powder keg situation. Both sides believe in using force to achieve their goals, one, in using it to make everyone believe in knowledge without perception, the other to make us all "equal" and by that I mean punish all achievers of any worth what-so-ever. The worst part is that both sides see themselves as righteous in their violation individual rights and the opposition as evil. As often happens in history, both are evil, and neither have any idea as to what is right and moral might even actually be. What I see as a possibility of happening is some kind of violence at the hands of either some union goon or some armed security officer "guarding" a congressman. All that is needed for national strife is a spark of violence involving death or maiming. All that has to happen is the government to be seen oppressing the people with violence for speaking out. Get ready, buy some bullets for self-defense (and a gun for that matter), because it all seems to already be starting note: I am attempting to improve my writing style, if you have some advice, please PM me.
  15. I always find the best way to argue with people when you intend to present objectivism is to never mention Ayn Rand or Objectivism just the argument itself, and often people will find themselves agreeing with you. Mention Rand only if they ask for more information on where you got the argument. If you simply present the classic unbroken chains of logic people nearly always agree. The only caveat here is that you must have some idea ahead of time that they will not deny reality to keep their own views intact.
  16. A few things about the Matrix: When the characters are in the matrix, all the colors but green are subdued a little so you know what "world" they are in, whether it be the computer generated one or not. Now that you know this, re-watch any of them and you will notice. I'm not sure but I think there are more things besides this that the directors used to make the fantasy look more artificial and fake. These facts are in the commentary for one of the movies, I'm not sure which one.
  17. No, I meant Asimov. This guy: -wikipedia How about mining the hell out of the asteroid belt? It's an earth sized amount of mass with similar minerals only in zero G for easy access!
  18. Way to try to convert us, in this objectivism forum. For human space flight to be done sustainably, and to be advanced beyond some arbitrary goal like the moon, it must be done for profit. Then, and only then, will Asimov's wildest dreams ever have a chance of becoming true.
  19. A math expert/teacher advocates in the following article that math should be done for math's sake regardless of practical applications. People are too stupid to use the practical applications of math anyway! (Sort of ad lib here, I don't actually think this) Children should play games instead of learning addition! Reason is useless! The only interesting questions in math are the kind that have no answer! This is just great. I can't even imagine how stupid the products of such an education would be. *shivers* Dr. Simon Pritchett anyone? Behold American public schools can get worse: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
  20. There is a larger minature railway in New Jersey, but it is no where near as detailed as this one. The NJ one doesn't even have cars of any kind.
  21. you do realize this has been edited with images in the background such that these series of videos support Christianity right?
  22. Omg that was great! Or should I say "oh my reason!" That was very funny! Reason & reality win again! My favorite quote: "Since your religion is in a terminal decline..."
  23. So it would seem. However, considering I simply wanted more information on it than was on the "discovering" university's website, I have still gotten what I was looking for. Thanks, RussK. I would be interested how exactly you found that info, considering dogpile as well as google were unable to help. I hate to be a little paranoid, like I sometimes seem to be to myself, but if this was such a huge step forward in power storage as it seemed, and would result in a huge advantage on the battlefield in the form of directed energy weapons as it might have been, wouldn't the sort of headline like: "Hafnium tested at a high energy physics lab to be a completely useless form of energy storage." be exactly what would might be claimed? Unless I misremember wasn't the real concept of the atom taught in physics for years in the 50's to protect the real information on how the atom bomb worked?
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