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Well, personally, I believe we were there. But. There is also the but. Of course there is the so called "evidence" like no stars on the photos etc that support the theory that we were NOT on the Moon. It may be so.

All of the evidence is thoroughly debunked.  You can't see stars in the daytime on Earth either, for the same reason you can't see them on the bright side of the moon.

But really, we all know where arguing on the internet gets you.  I constantly research alternate energy and efficiency, which inevitably runs me into crowds of Hydrogen heads and free-energy freaks.  Both groups are full of crap, don't know physics, don't want to listen to physicists and believe whatever fringe concoctions they find over reasonable debate any day.  I used to try to knock sense into them, but you have to be brutal and direct about it, which feels something like stomping on a puppy because they're so innocent and stupid before you do it.

Sounds like maybe you need to study more?  Not sure what your major is, but seems like it might be the same as mine (electrical engineering).

The other students and the teacher aren't calculating the gains and etc in their head, they have an understanding of what's going on because of an intuitive idea of how all of the components work individually and thus together.  I can do this with some circuits, knowing that an op amp will oscillate about "this fast" with certain components, but before you get that kind of thing going on you've gotta look at and calculate or build dozens, if not hundreds, of that type of circuit.

Also, you really have to be interested.  If you're not really passionate about a subject it's many times more difficult for you than if you are.  The "smart" students in my classes are always the most enthusiastic, not necessarily the "smartest."

But hey, take it with a grain of salt, I have the same problems.. Everything is elementary at the beginning of the semester and so I take it easy, before I know it things have snowballed and I'm impossibly behind.  Happens every time too.

The rare times I've gotten to be buddies with my professors I've done lots better not because I was sucking up, but because they're really passionate about their subjects and they can easily explain things I don't understand yet, which puts me at a quick advantage when trying to grasp new concepts.  If an individual doesn't understand something in class, he usually stays quiet regardless.  If he's talking to a professor one on one, no one else is there to make him feel like he's wasting everyones time with the questions.

NO, when the PC is on the hardware gets constant normal low electrical charge. When turning on and off it gets a high level electrical shock and that does the damage in the long run.

And that is what the regulators are for.
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I know how a regulator works and it's just another op-amp microchip, just as susceptible to current bursts as any other component, yet I must say engineers have been aware of this problem for a very long time and all of the components I've ever designed for were rated for power on.  It's a non-issue.  Just like cheap capacitors in Chinese power supplies you might have issues with this, but not because it shouldn't work, it'll be because the failing part was a real piece.

I don't know how many people here know this, so I'll throw it out there - resistance rises with temperature.  A cold computer is a very fast and well-run computer.  If it fails due to rapid temperature change (they do have minimum temp ratings because the thermal gain from running the PC can cause rapid expansion and tear the fine wires that connect the silicon chip to the chip leads) the failing part will just die, not intermittently fail.

I'd go with the fans idea..

Uh, FYI I just made another thread for this so the hijacking doesn't continue.

Darth is right, I sort of hijacked Raggits thread.

I've only dealt with police in traffic.. general experience is that I'm super polite about it, they're not at all, and I don't usually end up with tickets.  I've been demeaned, mocked and asked if I was stupid.  Well, no, I'm not stupid, I was in a little bit of a hurry and did something that I thought was safe given the circumstances even though it was a minor infraction of the law.  Regardless, they always ask if or imply that I am stupid.  There was one time that this did not happen, and that was when I got a ticket.  I was simply pulled over, gave my papers, given a ticket, and sent on my way.  Then I went to court to argue my case.  This is the proper way to deal with misdemeanors.  The reason it was different was because this particular small town was a speed trap and 99.5% of infractions were speeding.. i.e., he didn't have anything better to worry about.

But arguing with the police gets you gestapoed.  The thing is that they know certain things, while illegal, are very very minor in comparison with other things they could be dealing with, so if you're amiable you get away with a warning.  If you're a smartass and you point out that the law is too strict and what you were doing wasn't going to hurt anyone they justify lots of things that are entirely inappropriate, like choking.  COME ON, holding someone down, ok.  Twisting their arms to pain points to get them to subdue, ok.  Choking is torture, depriving you of oxygen, not an acceptable method of asserting your position of power to someone committing a misdemeanor.  Assault is a much more serious offense than skateboarding for civilians and it should be equally unacceptable as a repercussion for skateboarding, even though the perpetrators run.  On a tangent.. show me a place where bicycling is illegal.  The only difference is that there is a prejudice against kids, and knowing this, they fight it in a typical smart-assed teenage fashion.

The more I write about it the more I realize that in most cases the people who argue with and run away from police are the ones that most need to be taught a lesson.. but the proper channel is the judiciary system, not a police officer roughing them up.

Every time a discussion of the police comes up someone always chimes in, "Well they put up with a lot of crap."  This is true, but everyone who deals with the public deals with all manner of verbal abuse and the police are the only ones who can respond back with violence for that (usually triggered by waiting for minor resistance or any physical contact initiated by the perpetrator) and get away with it.

I don't think that the other people who are assholes make it justified for the cops to be arrogant and pretentious to everyone.  This isn't a case of a few bad ones either, there is a personally observed culture of arrogance and pretension, even (and especially) with the people I've closely known who are police officers.  You get confronted, it's understood that the attitude of the cop is going to be, "You're in the wrong, I'm righteous and I'm here to tell you what to do," when it should be, "Pretty sure what you just did is illegal, go talk with the judge about it."  They're not our judges and executioners, they're our enforcers.

I think the biggest problem with my county and local police is that they aren't paid crap.  There's a huge market for people with a high school education who want to tell other people what to do and get a company car to boot so they don't have to offer much money.  But if they did pay more, people would put up with more and do their job a lot better, probably without all of this extra nonsense.

In bigger cities with the budgets for it there is a requirement for an associates degree, higher pay, and a much more professional police force than I am used to dealing with.  The same goes for our state police.

Basically, I understand what the problem is, and it's that we don't pay for the extra quality that we need, but allowing people to get away with this crap just because it's hard to find good help isn't worth the consequence.

Plus the general american opinion is that the cop is always right and that cops put up with way too much crap already.

So beat up the 13 year olds, choking is better than simple detaining if they give you any crap because you have to show them you're the boss.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand changed my life.  Not saying it's a new bible or anything, just that it made me understand a lot about what I thought was wrong with the people around me at the time.

The last cool book I read was "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!" by the famous physicist Richard Feynman.  It's nice to know people who are extremely intelligent can also be wild and crazy sometimes.  It's also really fun to read about.  Your everyday quantum physicist isn't a good looking womanizer like that guy.

Basically I have two favourite authors ..

"For Whom The Bell Tolls" and "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway
"Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut

I second all of these, awesome awesome books.

Youtube, for all its faults and all of the absolutely pointless mind-numbing crap that is on there, brings the power of the press to the individual for the first time EVER.  Sure, anyone can make a zine, and has been able to since the 80's or so when printers and computers were cheap enough.

But now, if you screw up and it's on video, it doesn't matter who you are, you're going down.

Particularly police brutality/ridiculousness in the US comes to mind, here's one I saw today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH6AYVn2yw4

Normally what happens is the guys buddies in the PD don't give him any crap, the city doesn't fire or harass cops for stuff they do unless there's overwhelming bad publicity, and the mass media doesn't do anything unless it's a hate crime or something absolutely outrageous.  So things like this get let go, because lets face it, the kid was skateboarding and he tried to run so the cop had to apprehend him right?  But when you see a 13 year old kid getting tackled and choked, and you realize that he was JUST SKATEBOARDING...  (the cop makes no mention of anything other than, you were skateboarding, I tried to stop you, you ran)

I remember when I played POE I was so disappointed that it wasn't all finished yet, and now years later I find this!

AWESOME.

The graphics are really good and your sense of humor is hilarious.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/29/1621253

They aren't intentionally under-supplying the market, they simply cannot manufacture them fast enough.

They've been trying to raise output ever since they started selling.  I guess China is busy turning out other products.

When I used to work night shifts I'd get sleepless over weekends and hallucinate.  Kinda strange to have trees laughing at you without taking any drugs.

Don't care x5

My MySpace artist page was made solely to allow some of my friends to hear my satirical country/western song "I'll get down on one knee, if you'll get down on two."

Some of the private messages from random drop-ins (from my area) I got were pretty funny, considering it is a joke.  Lots of people do take MySpace seriously, for some reason.

It's nice to know you don't hate the US Farlander, but in this case pretty much any country in South and Central America with a vengeful attitude toward the US is absolutely justified in that for some reason or another.  Our history with them is just dismal, though it's almost entirely under Republican leadership that these things have happened.

Oh please, don't get me started on that.  Corporations pay for campaigns, which draw voters.  Voters hear what the media tells them and the media will not run stories unfavorable to the corporations who support them by ad revenue.

These corporations include the medical insurance companies, who are extremely powerful.

It's difficult to compare to other countries. I wish I could met a well off american with a solid insurance and ask him how different are the cures/services between here and there. I feel the vast majority of italian people feel proud to have a National Healt System and are willing to pass through some longhis waiting lines without any problem as far as the service at no or small cost.

The American system has terrible doctors and good doctors.. only they're sorted by hospital and price, so the health care can be top notch or it can suck pretty bad.  In my hometown (Muskogee, OK, USA) lots of people when being loaded into an ambulance request to be taken to Tulsa, OK because it's a bigger city with better hospitals and they don't want to die.  Of course not everyone who goes into Muskogee hospital dies, but they definitely don't have the same recovery rates as the best hospitals in Tulsa.

But basically, I don't have health insurance and pretty much everywhere is out of my price range.  So with this "better" system our politicians (supported by the medical lobby) claim we have, the rich have excellent health care and the poor/middle class have mediocre or none.  Even while paying for insurance health care still costs (deductibles) because the insurance companies don't want you going for treatment too often.

So the question is, is having better health care for the rich worth sacrificing the health care for everyone else?  Our politicians, who are very rich, say yes.

What are taxes and national debt like in England?  In the film, he only talks about France having equivalent taxes to the US but they certainly don't have an equivalent war machine.  Britain, I would suspect, is a better standard to measure against.

This was one of the dubious points in the film -- he interviews a single well-off French family as if to somehow prove that French taxes were low, which just doesn't make sense... he could have found a rich family in any country to make that "point".

Yes, European taxes are higher than the US, because we have to support the social systems via tax. Here in the UK, the standard tax rate is 30%, and approximately 20% of the taxes collected are spent on the health system. That means that effectively I pay 6% of my monthly wage as "health insurance", which seems fair to me.
How much does private health insurance cost in the US as a comparison?

The standard tax rate in the US is about 30%, when you combine Federal/State/Local taxes.  It's a proven fact that if you feed money into the country, no matter where it goes, it helps the economy.  Rather than feed it into education and medicine the US feeds it to the military machine and claims taxes would have to go up to get socialized medicine.

Private health insurance for a young (20s) single healthy man such as myself costs $100 a month, with $100 extra being subsidized by my employer (after one year of employment), so that's $200 a month.  I think it only covers expenses up to $50k though and has lots of exclusions for pre-existing conditions and certain types of injury.  The deductible (amount to be paid by the injured) was pretty high, like $500.  So it only covers pretty major/expensive stuff and you're always out $500.  For a whole family adequate insurance can be as high as $1k a month.  The charges, deductibles, maximum awards, etc all vary by plan of course.

I can't forget the quote by Nixon in the film, it was something like since the motivation was for profit no BS or minor health issues would make it through, so the incentive was in the right direction, rather than everything being checked out because medical service was free.  It gave me this sick feeling inside.

I didn't mention my experiences with the health industry which have been all standard shots, etc.  My dad had good insurance when I was a kid and I never had to worry.  Since I've been on my own I've had two workplace injuries that were both covered entirely by my employer's accident insurance plans.  I went to doctors immediately and never had problems.  Both had follow-up appointments.  One was to remove some shrapnel from my eye and one was stitches for a major cut on my knuckle.

What are taxes and national debt like in England?  In the film, he only talks about France having equivalent taxes to the US but they certainly don't have an equivalent war machine.  Britain, I would suspect, is a better standard to measure against.

I live in Oklahoma, USA, and though I'm not a native American I know lots and lots of them.  In case you didn't know, the natives are basically US funded socialist states and (so far as I know) all of them have their own medical centers.

I asked one native about her health care experiences once, and she went on about how nice it was to get free care even though the hospitals are a bit crowded.  I asked how her surgery went (she had something removed) and she said, "They left something inside of me.."

One of my friends has some mental health issues with paranoia and delusions.  They basically gave him some pills and hoped for the best after he told them what was going on in his life rather than talking him through his issues.  I'm pretty upset about this because he quit taking his medication (which was for depression, not paranoia and delusions and wasn't helping him anyway).  Now we're (all of his friends) just waiting for the next attack to strike so we can try to convince him that there's not a conspiracy going on around him.

These were both Cherokee Indians, all of their medical services are free, I'm not sure how the other tribes medical systems rate, but this one is sub-par compared to even some of the smaller municipal hospitals.

On the flip side, I couldn't afford mental health care, dentistry or a medical non-emergency right now at all and I can't get health insurance through my employer until I've been there a year, even then, I still might not be able to afford it.

I think that applies very much to the health service here as well.  Underpaid, underappreciated, and overworked. 

Where's "here?"

And now they're giving a free DVD away to everyone who enters

That's good, because you're gonna lose.

That pumpkin is smaller than my parrot.

All the parties here happened last weekend, so I guess I'll be working and then coming home to do whatever.

Maybe we could have a party in #AGS and get drunk?

Just a question: the ending I got was with Clyde telling Matt that he wasn't a killer.

Is that the best ending or one of the 2 alternate endings?

Spoiler

In the best ending he isn't handcuffed to the pole, and goes on to do other stuff.  One of the things between that point and the end will determine whether or not the best ending is reached.

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