Mister P-Mosh

We were looking at bed and breakfasts there, so definitely. :)--> What is good about those places? I'm completely ignorant of the city, so I don't understand the attractions of that. Where I live, it is nearly 100 degrees every day this week, and we have been overcast due to the ozone pollution. It's pretty nasty, and I figure there will be about the same, minus the ozone. I'll let you know if we do. :)-->

MasterP! Surely you jest!If you like Drinking, Eating and Gambling... but if you don't like to do those things you might want to go somewhere else... there's the graveyards, too! Why not Mazatlan? That will be the week before Christmas, providing I am employed or have enough money at that time.

OzGirl, I think that this site reflects the average American when it comes to discussing sex. Most people in the U.S. simply don't talk about it much, except for teenagers who obsess over it, and older people who condemn it. Also, as others have pointed out, TWI had a lot of sexual abuse, so it's difficult to have a light-hearted conversation about it when so many people have told stories of their rapes and such here.

Does anyone know of anything fun to do in New Orleans? My wife and I are wanting to make a weekend getaway somewhere close, and our options look like either New Orleans or Corpus Christi. I don't think brown ocean water would be all that exciting, so I'm leaning towards New Orleans, but other than Mardi Gras in April, I don't know what else to do there.

I've not been keeping up here for the past week or so, but I haven't figured out the purpose of this thread. Is it to incite cross forum fighting, or is it to revel in bitterness and whining? I've personally tried to avoid participating on this site for that reason, and I've tried to avoid the similar threads on the other site. Haven't we had enough meta whining to last for an eternity? Let's go argue about politics rather than incestuous message board personalities and who said what.

Liar, I think that you need to read I Thessalonians 5:29 before you come in here criticizing the rest of us.

I agree with everything Zixar said, and would like to add a bit too. Not only do you have to worry about the web, but if you use something like Outlook, Eudora or Thunderbird for your email, your email username and password are sent over the internet as well with no encryption. Using a sniffer, one can also easily reconstruct instant messenger conversations. I don't think you use telnet or IRC, but both of those are easily read as well. The only fairly "safe" things are websites that use https:// at the beginning, ssh rather than telnet, and things like VNC. By default though, there is no encryption for most things on the internet that you would connect to. As a side note, when I worked at an ISP, I know that we had Carnivore boxes on at least one of our networks. If you think what someone with the knowledge I discussed is bad, Carnivore can do more and has much greater access than you or I would to more networks.

That's true, there's always a way someone can get something that you post on the internet if they really wanted to. It's not likely, but it's good to err towards the side of caution anyway. Maybe not, but I should probably take my laptop to a Panera or another place that has free wireless internet access and record a log from a sniffer. If you install the WinPCap driver and Ethereal on your computer, you can easily see all sots of things being transferred over the internet.

I remember a teaching by a corps member before I left TWI about how he lets his daughter use the internet, but under really strict supervision. The idea was that "the adversary" is out there and wants to trick kids into going to be raped by old men and whatnot. So there was definitely an adversarial slant towards the internet, but they had finally started grudgingly accepting that it was useful for research for schoolkids.

I think that there are still good quality people in the Corps, but they definitely have mental problems since they are still in TWI. On the other hand, some people that I knew were intelligent and good have changed dramatically for the worse. I think that the Corps program attracted jerks when LCM was in charge, so a lot of them took over after more rational old-fashioned good people were leaving. There still were some good people that joined up during LCM's reign, but they were a lot more rare. As to the question of the quality of their intelligence, I don't think it matters as much as their ability to be a good leader. I think that most lead by fear, so there wasn't anything good about that at all, even if they did accomplish their goals.

I have less than ten posts to go before I hit 3,000 as well. I'm going to catch up with you, dmiller!

I forget where it was that I lived that this was taking place, I think Georgia, but at the time the school system was accepting anyone with any BA degree to be a teacher, but you'd have to take a two week certification course or something relatively easy. I guess that would be the reason for a provision like that, which is still sad.

I'm the opposite. I've had so many problems with helpdesks and support that I tend to blame the company rather than myself, and even when I do something wrong it's often because of a problem with them anyway. :D--> In this case though, even if pawtucket doesn't read the private topics, someone else potentially could. For example, TWI could plan a lawsuit which would result in a subpoena of the server information that gscafe resides on such as a database dump or whatnot. Since it wouldn't be a criminal investigation, pawtucket would probably find out, but still it's safe to be paranoid just in case and not put anything too private on the internet at all if you can help it.

This doesn't happen often, but a patch has been issued for Mozilla based browsers that run on Windows. If you use it on a Mac, Linux, or anything else it's fine, but if you run on Windows there is a Windows security flaw that can affect Mozilla based browsers. The site I linked to tells some of the story and provides a link to download the patch.

One of the problems with the outsourcing movement to India is that most of the workers from India are taught in a manner similar to that. The biggest complaint I hear is that people from India tend to not have much initiative and critical thinking skills, and instead require directions to follow. Since most managemers are incompetent, this results in something being built precisely how the American managers asked, rather than what the business really needed. It would be a shame if American kids were taught to be like this -- the ability to reason and use logic is something that I think is vital to us. Being able to correctly answer a question is great, but the other half of what you need is to understand why the answer is what it is.

Enemies? I guess I don't really care enough to have real enemies. Sure, there are people that annoy me, but I'd hardly consider anyone an enemy, particularly over the internet.

I wasn't specific in my last post about it, but I should clarify I think. In order for them to live in peace with anyone, they would have to drop the radicalism. There are plenty of good muslims out there just like there are plenty of good Christians, but I do think that the fundamentalist element is what the problem is. If they were to change their religion from an outward thing that they force on others to an internal thing that is their own belief system, then they would no longer be radicals and thus be able to live in peace. Also, I do believe any person can make up their mind to become peaceful, but there are things like probabilities to deal with. Also, if someone like Usama bin Laden were to suddenly embrace the west and convert to Christianity, I don't think that should get him a free pass for anything. People are still responsible for their past actions.

Yes, we are a representative republic. However, that is not to the exclusion of being a democracy. We have a mix really, because we don't directly vote for a president, but we do vote for other officials. We don't directly vote on most initiatives, but some get on the ballot. Even then, the point is that we live in a society where the ruling class is supposed to be the common man, rather than theocratic royal families. I disagree, because Klingons and Vulcans are different races. Arabs and anyone from the U.S. belong to the same species and race, so theoretically the people in extremist Islamic nations could have a culture just like our own if they choose to. The problem is not the matter of whether or not they are capable, but that the conditions are not right for freedom in their nations.

Well, pawtucket doesn't want it, although I personally think it's ok because people posting something publicly should have no expectation that it's kept private. Quoting does fall under fair use provisions of the copyright law, plus the fact that if her interpretation was correct, we would all be breaking the law (herself included) because computer browsers download a copy of the html as cache. The most she might be able to limit is quoting of the full text, but even then she has given up the rights to her words to pawtucket by posting here. On top of that, I seriously doubt that any competent judge would allow a trial over someone cross posting what she says, unless they somehow make a profit off of it. If someone were to sell a book about this site and post entire threads by people as their own, then they could be sued and possibly win. I think that Dot's post here is just something to make her feel good, but has no real legal basis.

And you are a master of Islamic doctrine, who has an unbiased view of religions that are not Christianity? My point still stands, and I know that I am biased against religion, but I'm equally biased against Islam and Christianity, of which TWI is a sect whether you like it or not. To me being Christian is still just a lesser degree of "waybrain." Feel free to disagree, but that doesn't invalidate my opinions.

That's a very good point, and one that it seems like the leaders of some countries like Saudi Arabia or the Taliban used to keep themselves in power. That's a good point, and I don't really see any solution for that which we can help the middle east with. It seems like they need revolution from within to reject the chains of religion and become free. Unfortunately, that would not be in the financial best interests of the U.S. so it would probably be shut down like Iran was. Good point. It seems to be that the best way to have a successful democracy is for the citizenry to step up to the plate and do something about it. I don't think what we have done in Iraq will lay the groundwork for a strong democratic nation. However, I don't really know what we can do to encourage it.

So that means that you posted a post to the poster boy for posters?

I've been thinking about this subject over the weekend, and although I still plan to keep saving money, investing in index funds, and purchasing real estate in the future, I think it's all for naught. It's entirely possible that within the next ten years, the U.S. is going to have a huge economic recession, perhaps even a depression, due to the baby boomers retiring and pulling their money out of stocks. I think the real estate market will be killed as well when they all start dying off. The only solution would be to open up the floodgates at the borders and start replacing these people, but I doubt that will happen. So my question would be what do those of you that are not baby boomers plan to do in the event that something catastrophic happens when they retire?

I would ask for one of certain politicians, but I don't want to deal with DHS jerkoffs who are too busy harassing innocent people rather than going after terrorists. :D--> Anyway, how does one turn these into a voodoo doll before lighting it up?

I just played this PS2 game from Rockstar (the makers of Grand Theft Auto) and it rocks. Basically, it's a game like the old cowboy movies where a tradgedy happens to you as a kid and you grow up to become a bounty hunter and seek revenge, and all that stuff. The controls are a little weird, for example you have to hold L1 to aim, use the left analog stick to walk and the right one to aim your gun then you press R1 when you're aiming at a target to shoot, but if you press and hold R2 you go into deadeye mode and have to wait for the deadeye bars to get filled before you can press R1 to shoot. Yeah, it's a bit convoluted, but once you get the hang of it it's great fun.