GT

Nice thread. Can anyone point to a current county that does have an official religion and say that is a place I would like to live? Hasn't history taught that letting a government mandate a religion is a recipe for disaster? Wasn't a large part of the initial population immigrating to this country fleeing countries that mandated a particular religion? And which particular flavor of Christianity would one choose to be the official religion? Southern Baptist? Mormonism? The Way International? Can you imagine giving The Way International a military and control of the laws?

Dawkins answering questions at a Virgina college.

If you have a broadband connection, this little tweak will give you a very noticeable increase in loading of web pages in your browser. Lightning Fast Browsing Trick For Internet Explorer And Firefox - video powered by Metacafe

No virus or security issues that you know about. Most PCs that are compromised, running viruses or being used by someone else (i.e. to send spam out), are not known to be compromised by their owner. The goal of viruses these days is generally not to damage the PC it infects, giving satisfaction to the writer of the virus. Most nowadays are to provide access to the PC in order that it can be used to do things that are not exactly legal, like send out thousands of spam emails or be used in a distributed denial of service attack. Training users not to install untrusted software or open certain email attachments is useful but not all encompassing. People can be tricked and frequently are. Remember the ILoveYou virus? It was sent as an attachment that resembled a Word document, even though it was a Visual Basic Script file. The email came from someone you knew because it propagated itself by emailing to everyone in a person's personal contacts address book. And that's a simple virus who's goal was only to replicate itself and do nothing else. Most viruses today use stealth and hide once they get on a PC. I'd say there is a high probability that more than 1 of your PCs has been compromised and being used for purposes you would not approve of. Running anti-virus software doesn't cure everything, but it's better than leaving the front door unlocked.

Use DVD Shrink to copy the DVD. Nice piece of software that will let you copy just about any DVD, copyright or no copyright. Just don't use it to copy DVDs you're not supposed to.

If you haven't read The God Delusion yet, I highly recommend it. Here he is on The Panel, a show based in Ireland:

Not sure if this has come up on this thread, but I found it interesting and thought you might enjoy.

Uh, shouldn't have to do this, but.... Read this then watch the video again.

God is real. And he's unbelievable. The Atheist Delusion

No. Even if that is the only place it dropped files, which is highly doubtful, the registry is still littered with entries from it. And I don't recommend you try to manually remove the registry entries, unless you're prepared to rebuild your PC from scratch. :)

Tom, That's one way to do it. :) The disk cleanup probably deleted the files you're looking for. I've never trusted that little utility, and have never used it. The prefetch folder is used by windows to pre-load programs it thinks you will be using, in order to speed up the load time. Anything in there you can actually delete and not harm anything (and probably speed up your computer since it isn't loading programs you're not actually using). See Gaining Speed: Empty Prefetch on your XP System The unvise32-* file in there is probably useless. I would put your Finale 2005 CD in and run the install from it. It should know if it's installed or not, and how to deal with it and should have all the files it needs on the CD.

Karl Kahler did. www.ex-way.com Highly recommended reading, especially if you have questions about The Way.

We might have to go down and drag all those in the Doctrinal dungeon up here for this.

Start button -- Run -- type: regedit

Michael Shermer's take on the episode. Try taking the test he refers to. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kramer’s Conundrum What the Michael Richards Event Really Means an opinion editorial by Michael Shermer After a paroxysm of racial viciousness at the Laugh Factory Friday night, November 17, 2006, Michael Richards, the 57-year old comedian who played Kramer on Seinfeld, explained to David Letterman and his Late Night audience the following Monday, after a barrage of negative publicity: “I’m not a racist. That’s what’s so insane about this.” Michael’s shattered demeanor and heartfelt repentance leaves us with what I shall call Kramer’s Conundrum: how can someone who spews racial epithets genuinely believe he is not a racist? The answer is to be found in the difference between our conscious and unconscious attitudes, and our public and private thoughts. Consciously and publicly, Michael Richards is probably not a racist. Unconsciously and privately, however, he is. So am I. So are you. Consciously and publicly, most of us are colorblind. And most of us, most of the time, under most conditions, believe and act on that cultural requisite. You’d have to be insane to publicly utter racist remarks in today’s society … or temporarily insane, which both science and the law recognize as being sometimes triggered by anger. And alcohol — recall Mel Gibson’s drunken eruption about Jews, or the college Frat boys slurring alcohol-induced insanities about blacks and slavery in Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Borat. The insidiousness of racism is due to the fact that it arises out of the deep recesses of our unconscious. We may be utterly unaware of it, yet it lurks there ready to erupt under certain circumstances. How can we know this? Even without anger and alcohol, Harvard scientists have found a method in an instrument called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which asks subjects to pair words and concepts. The more closely associated the words and concepts are, the quicker the response to them will be in the key-pressing sorting task (try it yourself at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/). The race test firsts asks you to sort black and white faces into one of two categories: European American and African American. Easy. Next you are asked to sort a list of words (Joy, Terrible, Love, Agony, Peace, Horrible, Wonderful, Nasty, Pleasure, Evil, Glorious, Awful, Laughter, Failure, Happy, Hurt) into one of two categories: Good and Bad. No problem. The next task is a little more complicated. The words and black and white faces appear on the screen one at a time, and you sort them into one of these categories: African American/Good or European American/Bad. Again you match the words with the concepts of good or bad, and faces with national origin. So the word “joy” would go into the first category and a white face would go into the second category. This sorting goes noticeably slower, but you might expect that since the combined categories are more cognitively complex. Unfortunately, the final sorting task puts the lie to that rationalization: This time you sort the words and faces into the categories European American/Good or African American/Bad. Tellingly (and distressingly) this sort goes much faster than the previous sort. I was much quicker to associate words like “joy,” “love,” and “pleasure” with European American/Good than I did with African American/Good. I consider myself about as socially liberal as you can get (I’m a libertarian), and yet on a scale that includes “slight,” “moderate,” and “strong,” the program concluded: “Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for European American compared to African American.” What? “The interpretation is described as ‘automatic preference for European American’ if you responded faster when European American faces and Good words were classified with the same key than when African American faces and Good words were classified with the same key.” But I’m not a racist. How can this be? It turns out that this subconscious association of good with European Americans is true for everyone, even African Americans, no matter how color blind we all claim to be. Such is the power of culture. We are by nature sorters. Evolutionists theorize that we evolved in small bands of hunter-gatherers where there was a selection for within-group amity and between-group enmity. With our fellow in-group members, we are cooperative and altruistic. Unfortunately, the down side to this pro-social bonding is that we are also quite tribal and xenophobic to out-group members. This natural tendency to sort people into Within-Group/Good and Between-Group/Bad is shaped by culture, such that all Americans, including those whose ancestry is African, implicitly inculcate the cultural association, which includes additional prejudices. The IAT, in fact, also demonstrates that we prefer young to old, thin to fat, straight to gay, and such associations as family-females and career-males, liberal arts-females and science-males. Such associations bubble just below the surface, inhibited by cultural restraints but susceptible to eruption under extreme inebriation or duress. Michael Richards’ sin was his deed; his thoughts are the sin of all humanity. Only when all people are considered to be members of one global in-group (in principle, if not in practice) can we begin to attenuate these out-group associations. But it won’t be easy. Vigilance is the watchword of both freedom and dignity. We should accept Mr. Richards’ apology for losing his temper and acting out those hateful thoughts. Perhaps we also ought to thank him for having the courage to confess in public what far too many of us still harbor in private, often in the privacy of our unconscious minds. As the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote: Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

Because you installed some software from Road Runner when you were using it and it modified your IE settings. You can fix it yourself. Per Microsoft: As always with Microsoft software, reboot when you're done.

Texas high school football game from 1994. John Tyler: 43 Plano East: 17 Time left in game: 2:42 You have to see this to believe it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P6UU6m3cqk

That's your problem. All your symptoms point to it also. You're running out of memory. 256MB is barely enough for Windows to run efficiently after it's been on a PC for a year and all the other software that likes to run in the background after installing. Windows will try to fake additional memory by treating some of the hard drive as memory, but for something that needs real memory to function properly, it just doesn't work and anything can happen, including corrupted files. Try upping it to 512. 1GB is better.

In that case, please explain to me how a court hearing a civil case with action brought by the plaintiff constitutes government action? What is the purpose of a court? Do courts ever initiate action on their own?

Are you serious? Better go back to that high school civics class and pay attention this time.

The Targets of Kramer's (Michael Richards) Tirade Speak Out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATWTKhmNWBU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QOspidd7ko

By virtue of not being a government agency. It's easier to see using the "no law respecting an establishment of religion." A public school, which is a government agency funded by tax dollars, cannot promote any religion. A private school can. A southern federal court cannot display a copy of the 10 commandments, any private business or home or church can. Without government action, there can be no violation of 1st amendment rights because the prohibitions in the 1st amendment are on the government.

There is no other mention of freedom of speech in the constitution. The only mention is congress being prohibited from enacting laws that abridge it. What that means is that you can not be arrested and tried for what you say ever, outside of the noted exceptions to public safety.That is why the government will do nothing against Richards. Because he has broken no laws, because no laws against such speech exist and never will. But just because the government will do nothing, does not mean another citizen can and will. You do not have the right to injure someone else with your speech. Anyone injured by someone else, in any way, can take them to court under civil law and sue for damages. Richards can claim his 1st amendment rights a thousand times in court and it will do him no good. He is not being prosecuted by the government. He is being sued for injuring another person by the person he injured. Freedom of speech is irrelevant here and does not exist. If he were being tried by the government, he very well then could claim his 1st amendment rights and would win every time. There would be government action then. Freedom of the press used in some of your analogies is another can of worms. Suffice to say, the press can be held accountable in civil court for libel and slander. About the only time I have ever known someone from the press going to jail for something they wrote is when they fail to divulge their sources when a criminal investigation requires it. Even that is a debated topic of whether it falls under freedom of press because it involves government action. But the press is sued all the time by people outside the government for slander and libel. Using their "freedom of the press" defense does not work for them there either because there is no government action. They must be able to back up what they write with facts or be prepared to compensate the party they injured. As for opinion, it is a valid defense in most states, but not guaranteed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slander_and_l...ited_States_law (if everyone else is going to use Wikipedia..... <_< ) Without government action, there is no constitutional freedom of speech defense you can claim, because it doesn't exist. Outside of government action, you are subject to civil law which has no "1st amendment".