Colin Angus Mackay wrote: Second languages are great! My second language (in order of learning) was French but I have forgotten most of it by now because I haven't used it for over 10 years. I keep promising myself that one day I will buy me a French language manual and will try to refresh my memory. Not that I have any use for French, but I feel bad that I don't remember any of it. Well, I have another reason - I always wanted to read Alexander Dumas books in the language they were written. :) ------------------------------ http://www.kostya.com/ [^]

It says "I love Russian language". ------------------------------ http://www.kostya.com/ [^]

Privet Phil! This is completely off topic, but I just wanted to say that it is nice to see someone who likes Russian language. :-) Всего доброго. P.S. Perhaps you should consider changing "язикь" in your signature to "язык". :-) ------------------------------ http://www.kostya.com/ [^]

Philipp Roesch wrote: if we transfer this into humans we can say that there's nothing but dna and experience, no free will. I've been looking into the question of free will for a while now and as unfortunate as it is I think that you might be correct. Theoretically speaking we live in a purely deterministic universe where future events could be calculated and therefore we might not have a free will. Philipp Roesch wrote: i'm convinced of this as i'm about the fact that one can raise a healthy baby into a nobelprize winning scientist as well as into a murder (the requirement is naturally total control). How can you have any control if you do not have any free will? ;-) ------------------------------ http://www.kostya.com/ [^]

Is this the old issue with storage devices manufacturers counting 1KB as 1000 bytes while scientists thought that they have 24 more bytes per kilobyte? :)

I've smoked my last cigarette on January 21, 2003. At the time I smoked about 2 packs of Camel a day for about 17 years. I just went cold turkey route - no patches, no gum. First 3-5 days were the worst, my head was spinning like I was drunk, I could hardly work or do anything that required focusing. Then it became progressively easier and now I hardly ever think about it. Instead of concentrating on not smoking I've concentrated on not buying cigarettes. If you don't have them - you can't smoke them. I've just told myself that the cig manufacturers will not see a penny of my money anymore. I told myself that I am tired of being dependent on something that I don't need. So health reasons weren't even my main concern - it was about kicking the addiction and saving money. It will only get better. Good luck.

SMTP servers don't send packets to POP servers. SMTP and POP3 are completely independent protocols. If you search CP for articles containing "SMTP" you will find several implementations of both SMTP and POP3 protocols.

Well, I guess we have 2 explanations then: one is that scientists are correct and our universe is really about 20 billion years old and so on... or someone or something spent an enormous amount of resources and time to trick the whole human race into thinking that universe is older than 6000 years... Occam's razor comes to mind... I vote for the simplest explanation. Which one do you vote for?

Jason Henderson wrote: I don't take internet arguments seriously. Good. I wish I could say the same about myself, a lot of times I take things too personally. I need to learn from you. :-) Jason Henderson wrote: But really, if you disagree, why not say why? I think sometimes people feel that they should display disagreement with a statement, but don't feel it is necessary to get into a "formal" argument about it. I guess voting system gives you a kind of an easy way out - you disagree, but you don't really state why... ;-) In case if you want to know why I personally disagreed with your post - it is because calling one of the well regarded proponents of science like Carl Segan to be ignorant without any supporting evidence is hardly an intelligent argument/statement, even if it is in agreement with the way you feel.

Jason, I think that voting your post down was a way for people to show that they disagree with your statement without actually starting an argument over it. I wouldn't take it personally. Have a happy new year!

nssone wrote: The word is figment. Thank you. English words (as well as words in general) escape me sometimes. nssone wrote: You want proof of how much science has changed? Science does change and that is what makes it so much more valuable to us. New scientific theories come to supercede the old ones as we gain more and more knowledge about our world. This is because scientific knowledge is based on empirical evidence and if we find better interpretation of data we go with that. Creationists are not in the process of finding the truth, they are in the process of trying to find ways to support their believes. Science in effect says "How did this world come to be the way it is?" and it searches for answers. Creationists say "God created everything! How can we prove it?". Let me quote Gould again: "The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents." nssone wrote: I have seen reports on finding evidence that supports biblical accounts of history, but not just word-of-mouth type evidence, but scientifically proving the stories of the bible. That's no worse than what Asimov or Sagan do. And then they have their supporters of the 'evidence' they've found. That evidence is available to the general public, I've found many books on Christian Sciences as well. There are reports of ghosts and UFO sightings everywhere. Photographs and all. There are books about Santa Clause. There are psychics and astrologers on every TV channel and in every newspaper. One of the African tribes have a creation myths that says that we all were made out of elephant's crap or some such story. Should we believe them all? No. We should look at them and if we find no evidence to support them or if we find evidence that disproves them we should discard them as false. I have not seen a single Creationist argument that was true or that did not follow this strategy: "For an example, if I believed in a flat Earth and wished to prove it to myself, I need only to ignore all

Awesome photograph! Happy New Year!

nssone wrote: How fair of a world is it that we live in when stories in books I read in school on Hindu religion are called 'mytholgies', when I've never heard the story of Noah's Ark ever referred to as a mythology. Noah's Ark story is a myth and should be referred to as such. And if it isn't called a myth, it is not due to any validity that it holds but due to enormous influence that Christian dogma still holds over the western societies. nssone wrote: How do we know it to be false? The burden of proof is on the "supporters" of the myths. We don't have to prove them wrong, we did not make their stories up - they did. We know that Christian myths are false, because there is no convincing evidence supporting them and there is plenty of evidence contradicting them. nssone wrote: Have these teachers and scientists been around for billions of years to tell us for sure? Let's say you come home and find that someone was murdered in your house while you were gone. There is no witnesses of the crime. How do we know that you were not the murderer? Well, we look at the evidence, right? Of course, it would be cool to have a video recording of the Big Bang or abiogenesis, but due to lack of such "sure" evidence we have to rely on the best alternative for discovering truth about our world we have to date - scientific method. nssone wrote: They make up the minds for general public? It appears to me that they are in and of themselves are as bad as religions, that they too are holding back the search for the truth. All the scientific evidence is available to the general public. Everyone is free to go to a library, get a book, read about and even verify for themselves any of the scientific knowledge that we have today. And if the general public is too lazy and/or too ignorant to look at the scientific evidence and they choose to believe in psychics and astrology it is very sad. The difference between religion and science is that you don't have to believe science blindly, you are encouraged to think for yourself and participate in discoveries. And if one day you will discover that Einstein was wrong and will be able to prove it you will not be burned at stake, but will likely to nominated for a Nobel Prize. nssone wrote: But since I haven't been around for billions of years to know the absolute truth about everything, I can't say what truly happened years

nssone wrote: I still think it's unfair for them to say that Christianity itself is holding back science. "Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?" -- Stephen Jay Gould

Exorcisms are soooo last century. In this century we do WindowsUpdate instead... ;-)

It seems to be pretty accurate, at least the first few entries: 1. Secular Humanism (100%) 2. Unitarian Universalism (97%) 3. Nontheist (85%) 4. Liberal Quakers (75%) 5. Theravada Buddhism (72%) 6. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (67%) 7. Neo-Pagan (56%) 8. Taoism (40%) 9. New Age (38%) 10. Reform Judaism (36%) 11. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (32%) 12. New Thought (30%) 13. Bahб'н Faith (28%) 14. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (28%) 15. Mahayana Buddhism (28%) 16. Scientology (25%) 17. Orthodox Quaker (22%) 18. Sikhism (22%) 19. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (21%) 20. Jehovah's Witness (13%) 21. Eastern Orthodox (7%) 22. Hinduism (7%) 23. Islam (7%) 24. Jainism (7%) 25. Orthodox Judaism (7%) 26. Roman Catholic (7%) 27. Seventh Day Adventist (7%)

Awesome! Speaking of photography, did you see this http://news.sel.sony.com/pressrelease/3920[^]

According to the rules of logic (AFAIK) the burden of proof is on the one who makes a statement. It is not my or your job to disproof every crazy idea that someone is throwing out there. It is their business to prove that their idea is worth our consideration.

I am sorry, I don't have an answer to your question, but I am pretty sure that anything encoded in base64 should have byte length divisible by 4. Both 550 and 515 are not multiples of 4. Just my 2 cents.

You can try http://www.pbase.com/[^]. I think they are still free.