Sip

Next time you are at one of those parties, drink more sensibly, stay away from drugs, dress more stylish (just a bit), make eye contact with a few of the hotties (yah, you heard me, and yes, they are watching in ways you will never understand) and TALK to them. Anything. Don't be overly aggressive. Don't be rude. Don't be shy. Don't be affraid to make a fool of yourself but you are naturally good at that Yah you will get shot down ... sometimes you will be rediculed ... sometimes quick and painful ... sometimes slow and painful ... but you'd be surprised at what can happen. ... and always keeps this in mind ... almost everyone there is there to see and be seen. Unless they are there with a significant other (steady boyfriend, husband, etc), they really basically are there for why you are there.

Assuming taxes are paid, I'd pay off my loans, then my parents loans, lift the jeep with a new set of wheels and tires, high output alternator, onboard welder, and air compressor. Whatever is left, I'd donate a few thousand (up to 5% of remainder) to the red cross, the rest I'd split 50/50 between long term bonds and stocks. In terms of stocks, again I'd split things 50/50 between blue chip and other high risk (under valued yet unstable) stocks.

FYI, the server is located in the US. So just by posting here you are tied to something foreign to begin with, whether you want it or not.

Ok but yes, a prostitute is moral. I have no problem with prostitutes and prostitution as long as the involved parties are adults and are so doing of their OWN will. In other words, as long as there is NO forcing envolved (to either party) and they chose their actions according to their own free will. About my daughter ... I think I will be able to equip her with enough useful skills that she will not have to resort to that line of work. Of that, I am pretty sure But the one thing I don't understand is this ... are you saying there should be NO punishment for any wrong doing in society? If not, then what's with all the jail questions? Not EVERYTHING is a moral law. Some laws are pure traffic laws in order to maintain order when sharing a scarce resource, i.e. roads in this case. Leave morality out of punishing a guy for getting a ticket Same thing applies to paying taxes. It's not a moral question. It's a practical question about how to make a society function as a whole. You don't pay, you get punished.

Arad, let's cut to the chase. We went through two pages. Starting from the title of the thread I got this disturbing feeling that you are here to preach that there should be a super being that is a moral law giver. If so, just spill it and don't try to hide it as a discussion since obviously you don't care to discuss but just hide your "preaching" in form of questions and answers that don't go anywhere.

Yes I guess I am saying that. Some people want and need somebody no doubt about that .... some people can't feel complete without having others around ... no doubt about that either. But that doesn't mean that EVERYONE is like that. NOTHING is set in stone. People sometimes forget that. I know several female friends who are slowly being devistated by the fact that they are supposed to get married before they hit 30. And that just simply perplexes me as I can find no "human life manual" that says that is in the operation specifications or otherwise things will not be covered under warranty Nothing is set in stone. Only thing is that we will all die at some point and we all have but one life to live. What you chose to do with that life is completely up to YOU. Ok that's enough of me being philosophical for this month.

Someone came up with the concept of marriage a long long time ago. It was certainly before the jet/automobile age and far from the communication age. Along the same lines, this concept of everlasting "romantic love" between a man and a woman started to (re)evolve at some point (Renaissance ?) and was reinforced by mainstream religions for various reasons. Now people have this misconception that "man" had been meant to find the "one true love" in his or her life since the beginning of time. And of course that hasn't been true all the time ... look back and you will find periods that even homosexual relationships were common place (the norm) at times. Look at for example Japanese Samurais I have said this before ... we are living in a very dynamic world now. People move great distances in short times for various reasons. Many are surrounded by strangers most of the time. Many years ago, things were much more communal. People spent entire life times in one place knowing the same set of people. They depended on each other for survival. So what this is telling me, is that we are yet again at a period of change. Much like the monogomous man/woman relationships have come into style for the recent past, I think there are clear signs that it is slowly going out of style and we'll see new things emerging. Now, we have systems in place (referring to US) that enable one to be completely independent from adolescence till death. Add on top of that media for completely new types of communities (ahem internet) and you have the basic ingredients that can completely change the social fabric. What will happen exactly I don't know.

I think you are seeing this "anonymous internet discussion page phenomenon". The people you will find here in general will likely not fall in the "everybody needs somebody" category. The people here, I am hypothesising, are more of the type: I can find somebody at any time, with minimal effort, who will lend a sympathetic "ear" in the vast anonymity of the internet. Times are changing. --- Ok Thoth ... now it's your turn

Last couple of posts removed by me as part of normal maintenance.

Wow Vvaa!!! That's COMPLETELY fascinating. <_<

Boy am I GLAD it wasn't me. But FYI, only admins can do such things (not moderators) so that narrows down your list of candidates to hug and kiss.

I don't subscribe to that point of view AT ALL.

Oh and in terms of consuming unlimited amounts of money ... Have you ever been to a trendy SUSHI place in LA? Holly Crap talk about needing some financial adivsors to pick stuff off the menu!!!! But for a mere $10 a day, you can literally have ALL YOU CAN EAT. Yah, that's less than $4000 a year. UNLIMITED FOOD for $4K a year (in the US) ... now something is wrong here

$10 mil is nothing these days. If you said 10 bil and then going to 20 bil yah ... at $10 mil, at a modest 4% APR, you are making about $400K (yah ok I didn't do the compounding so sue me ) in interest a year. That's ok but 800K would certainly be much more preferred. Don't get me wrong, $400K a year would be a decent living but it is not in the "really" comfort zone of doing ANYTHING you want. But if you phrased your question in the 10 bil versus 20 billion, then you have a point. Just keep in mind that there are those that can easily drop a few million in a single weekend trip to Vegas for example.

Ok let's go one by one Yes. But unfortunately as you are pointing out, this is not always possible. Stormy's point is about IF it is possible THEN what she says (obviously as with any rule) ... etc. Choices: Send to jail: they are the only ones that hurt. Don't send to jail: potentially many will hurt. Seems like the choice here is clear. In my opinion, this does not violate Stormy's rule (hey! how's that for a name?) as either choice will lead to hurt. In other words, this is an unfortunate case where hurt is INEVITABLE. Come on now ... do you really want to discuss this one? Refer to above and below. But if you don't breakup with them, you will hurt them more since obviously you are not ready to commit to them as much as necessary. So again, this is one of the cases where hurt is INEVITABLE. Stormy's rule doesn't apply. Yes. Accidents are wrong. We should try our best to avoid them. Stormy's rule applies and I'm pretty sure most people try their best to avoid accidents. By applying Stormy's rule ... yes they could be moral in doing so if both parties are adult and agree. Yes. Things are not 100% black and white in the world. That's why you can't put blanket moral rules on everyone for any time and any circumstances. This sentence itself explains the WHOLE discussion I believe! Only GOD can judge ... OK sorry I couldn't resist We had the laws of the bible since a few hundred years after Jesuses crucifiction. That's WAAAAY after day one as far as I know. But I'm sure some histroy buffs can clarify things in more detail. I don't think Domino did any such thing.

Last warning. Please refrain from such "personal observations" or you will leave us moderators no option but to take action.

Oh well ... in that case it is perfectly fine

Nice post Arapa (the long one)

I know some people dismiss Star Trek as yet another sci fi creation but they actually deal a lot with issues like this! I am much more familiar with the next generation series though ... Anyway, one of the episodes which particularly comes to mind dealt with aliens that communicated through strange references to their past history. I believe the episode was called Darmak. They would say things like: "Shaka, when the walls fell." "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra." "Mirab, his sails unfurled!" and only with things like that! Throughout he whole story the captain of the ship was stranded at a planet with one of these guys and they had to figure out a way to communicte. Just to put things in perspective, that kind of language would be like for us to start saying things like: "Romeo and Juliet" "Noah when the clowd came" "Judas and Jesus" ... With a quick search on the web, found this site with a lot more info about that episode: http://www.chaparraltree.com/sflang/darmok.shtml I personally found the thinking behind the creation of the episode very fascinating.

Not sure what your question is asking Sasun but maybe it stems from my careless use of the word logical there. I actually meant numerical 0 and 1. We use the '0' and '1' symbols (numbers) to represent the logical '0' and '1'. In a circuit, that may be implemented using high and low voltages. When communicating with light, that could be the presence or absence of photons. But there is a clear distintion between the "logical" 1/0 (true/false on/off presense/absence of something) and the symbols we use to represent that information. The traditional way is to use the arabic numbers but that doesn't have to be. But we shouldn't confuse the two. So now with the "real numbers" 0 and 1, there can definitely be an infinite number of values between those two (fractions). If you want, you could choose 0.000012342 to represent the "logical 1" and 0.2443222 to represent "logical 0" if that would suite your needs better Sorry about the confusion.

If Japan is anything like Califronia, then the technique is a complete failure. Predicting an earth quake in California is like saying the sun will come up tomorrow. There's a "little one" almost for sure every few days.

Looks like the topic got some interest in another thread so why not have a separate thread for it? It seems to me that the "language" section may be the best place for it. So the basic premise that I subscribe to is this ... communication is the transfer of information. In order to communicate, first there must be an established representation of information. A binary bit (we represent it as 0 and 1 but any other scheme may also be valid) is the fundamental building block for representing information. Nothing "smaller" can contain any useful information. On the other extreme, we can have a continuous range (such as an analog signal) that can have infinitely many "values" (even between a logical 0 and 1). But whatever the basis for representation, you either have continuous "entities" or discrete entities or a combination of the two to represent information. The point I am trying to get at, is that I don't care what planet aliens evolve on (yes, the original topic started with alien communication), how they chose to do it, whether they use smells, hand gestures, sound, RF, Infrared, or colorful balls to communicate, they most likely do it through the use of an established information representation. Note that all languages on earth (that I know of) rely on the use of ordered sets of discrete symbols for communication (letters used to form words then used to form sentences, paragraphs, etc). But we also communicate through color, sound pitch, and gestures, some of which are continuous "entities". So now one question which I can pose here is this ... did the languages on earth evolve the way they have by chance or is there something fundamentally universal about the way we communicate through the use of words and sentences?

Well, chances of being able to view directly on our TV is basically 0. The people that came up with NTSC or PAL or HDTV whatever standard did it for various reasons that usually has little to do with "universal constants". Basically the signal timings, the resolutions, power levels, etc are somewhat arbitrary but still "standardized" for whatever reason. Now the digital signal you get from your satellite dish is VERY different from the TV signal coming from the air or cable. The signal from the satellite you can basically think of as encrypted MPEG. In addition to the encryption, there is a very sophisticated wavelet based compression on top of it (I don't know exact details of each satellite dish company of course). So in order to reconstruct that signal, first you have to decrypt (very hard if you have no inside info), then decompress something that you have NO idea about. If you don't know how MPEG works, chances of you being able to decompress it is basically 0. Now, if they are sending some sort of raw signal, which is likely if their intention is to communicate, then for us to be able to figure some things out is not that unlikely. After all, math is universal. Patterns, groupings, repetitions etc will be the same anywhere you go in the universe. In any case, it may take years and years to be able to understand a signal but if intention is to communicate, then chances of communication is good if the signal ever reaches and is detected. But just randomly getting a "TV" signal and being able to view it is very very very very unlikely.

Interesting question which is probably beyond my expertise ... but my suspicion is that if it is not intentionally encrypted then there is a good chance to understand some things about it. The problem would be trying to reconstruct the underlying language. Mapping the signal symbols to the language will not be a problem but reconstructing the language and putting semantics on top of the syntax will not be that trivial. So basically, what I am saying is that most likely they will be using a finite set of symbols to communicate. That finite set will be represented by characteristics of the transmitted signal. Figuring out that part (the mapping) won't be hard. But understanding the meaning ... if they are sending anything like our video transmissions then it would be TRIVIAL to reconstruct images. But if we get a transmission from their satellite companies that encrypt things in order to be able to charge their subscribers ... then forget about it.

Domino, good point about the "intelligent" sociopaths as there have been some in the past that have shown amazing intelligence. Fortunately, they seem to be more of the exception than the rule. But then again, their "intelligence" may be up to question. It's all a matter of wording and definitions I guess. Seems like we both agree that the moral intelligent being will prevail at the end