dorbie

Do you mean that you think God actually just made stars and put them where they are to kickstart the universe? If thats true then I urge you, to go to NASA's APOD site (astronomy picture of the day) and look up some photos of star-forming nebulas, the 'nurseries' of the universe. The sheer scale, in every dimension, of these structures, the complexity, the elegance, the unimaginably powerful processes that we can observe happening in them is absolutely staggering. The universe around us "just happening" is a wonderful, wonderful thing. There is also the inconvenient fact that the light from those images has been travelling towards Earth for Billions of years. If God did set them in place he also set the fake light in place to reach us now before the light from his creation would actually have reached us if they'd just been switched on. Of course this is just nonsense, the stars and galaxies have been around for billions of years, even the light from nearby Andromeda has been travelling for 2.5 million years. The universe and everything about it is VERY old by our standards. Saying the Universe was recently created is no more plausible than me saying we were all created 5 minutes ago with false memories intact to make us think we've been living our lives and participating in this thread, but it was an elaborate delusion. The physical universe we live in is profoundly ancient and extremely consistently profoundly ancient.

It means you discover less. You make less progress. That computer you're sitting in front of for example wouldn't exist without a whole bunch of scientific explanations. Newton was a devout Christian, but he still sought explanations for the physical nature of the Universe. The two are not always mutually exclusive. He didn't just take it on faith that God holds us to the surface of the Earth. He devised his laws of motion and formulated equations for the force of gravity. P.S. and yes that DID make him a lot more intelligent than his fellow Christians.

Well do you believe God uses gravitational collapse of interstellar material to set the stars in the heavens? Do you believe He uses nuclear fusion to light the stars and that heavier atoms are created in that process?

P.S. there are some PROFOUNDLY mysterious and mystical things about the nature of our Universe that science has revealed. The Big Bang, Fusion, Supernovae, organic chemistry and evolution seem almost mundane by comparrison, but experiment confirms all of this and the very strange other stuff that scientists are compelled to accept (Einstein resisted) but that you miss out on.

See my P.S. The stuff I believe is quite breathtaking and rewarding. I believe we are made of atoms that formed inside supernovae and that star stuff was blasted back into space before collapsing under gravity to make everything we see. 100% of astronomers and I'd estimate all competent scientists are solidly behind me on this one. Your problem is not just that you have to undo evolution to support creationism (which for some reason you pick on as weak when it is one of the stronger and more self evident theories). You have to undo most if not all modern scientific discovery. Where do YOU think the Earth came from? And once again, where did God come from? You cannot look at the complexity of the Universe and then explain it with something MORE complex like God. That is NOT an explanation. You can call it an explanation, but it's just shifting the problem with a pseudo-explanation that makes you feel better, it actually explains nothing.

P.S. if you really want to know where the chemicals came from, their constituent atoms with the exception of hydrogen were formed billions of years ago in the hearts of stars or during supernovae explosions and scattered during those supernovae explosions. They then gravitationally collapsed to form the solar system. You can get a telescope and watch the processes going on in the heavens today. There are vast clouds of complex elements visible in supernovae remnants detectable from their signatures in the detectable spectrum and we can see similar clouds collapsing into new solarsystems in regions of new star formation. There is emerging evidence of organic chemistry in space but certainly chemical reactions happen spontaneously on planets even those without life.

Did God just appear?

The original organisms arose from self replicating chemicals that formed from reaction processes in the primordeal soup of organic chemicals, amino acids etc. Where did God come from? He is a lot more complex than you , I or an amino acid soup and should require significant explanation.

I preferred your earlier response. It was clearly a joke both from her and from you. Your earlier response of course went further than her statement, but since everyone has a sense of humor........ oh wait.

More govt. control my brother. More control. Where does it end? Yes. Perhaps. but the advantages of a ID Card scheme really outweigh the disadvantages. Also, I've never had a problem with national biometric databases and their being searched. Then again, that may just be the 20 years as a cop speaking. Alternatively, it may be the 40+ years of never having had to lie about who I am and being quite happy to prove it. The cynical part of me does wonder at the motivation of folk against ID Cards & databases. It's not about a well intentioned benign government. It's about the abuse of this by a worse government or the harm done to people caught in an anonymous beauraucratic meat grinder that won't get it's nose the fuck out of their life. I'm reminded of the British bobbys on the channel islands who happily enforced for the nazi occupiers. Stick with enforcement and lay off policy if you don't have the imagination to avert bad policy.

That's why I was waiting for an answer :) As you know, modern genetic researchers have confirmed that according to human genes we did NOT have a single ancestor, and therefore the Noah concept failed right here. You just need to look at your family tree branching backwards to understand this. We truly are vehicles for our genes. Modern research has also just found evidence that even AFTER we separated from our common ape-like ancestors, there was cross-breeding between the genetically different populations for millions of years. Of course the only reason they know this is the genetic material from the perverted monkey sex is actually present in our own genetic makeup today. It explains a lot really.

Agreed, you could remove certain types of claim from coverage and let people take their chances if fees are the issue. You have the NHS as a safety net which you all pay for already anyway. In this thread I detect an undertone of entitlement when a UK skydiver gets hurt (beyond essential medical care), if you have that attitude you have NO BUSINESS complaining about membership fees, because you're the problem/cause of that. If you want a safety net you should buy it up front not sue for it and force everyone else to pay for it post-facto.

Does you believe that all the people of different races and ethnics came from a single person (Noah and his wife)? Blacks, Indians, Asians? Both are flawed interpretations of each belief. Populations evolve, before we had populations we do not know if there was a single ancestor, self replicating chemicals in some primordeal soup would have been subject so similar evolutionary forces and populations of complex chemicals would likely have existed and competed for millenia. You have a continuum of creatures including overlapping exchange of information through reproduction, and mutual influence on the environment from chemical soup to us, and I don't think you necessarily have instances of a single ancestor. I think that search is based on a flawed understanding of evolution, unless you have a catastrophic event and I'm thinking of a species like the cheetah that was almost extinct (through disease) and came back as almost a species of clones, but back through that nexus there are still many ancestors that contributed genetic material to the species. The most amazing thing about evolution IMHO is the bootstrapping of the environment that gives rise to a habitat for subsequent more complex organisms.

Ahem, http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2697699;#2697699 Probably not as obtuse as making the body of your post an emoticon.

This is your problem right here. The canopy does not exert a lesser force than gravity just because you are descending. If it did your rate of descent would accelerate until your canopy generated more lift to compensate.

With hyperthreading when your cleanup process is waiting on the disk it is probably scheduling the idle process in because there is no penalty for doing so. It is not that te idle process is taking up half the CPU, the problem is that the cleanup process is unable to keep the CPU busy (probably due to disk i/o). It's called the idle process for a reason. When CPUs run multiple tasks they need to schedue between them. This means that all sorts of executable information like instruction cache program counters and registers may need to be changed. Hyperthreading duplicates all of that (cache etc can be shared, the real smarts is in the duplication of registers which can be complex on a modern CPU) although there is one CPU core w.r.t. arithmetic units etc. it has duplicate resources and can pretend that it is two CUs. This reduces he overhead of multitasking. Its a small but significant benefit. Hyperthreading is now obsolete though. It is obviously much better to have 2 real CPUs than one hyperthreading CPU. Core duo CPUs are a great choice, you won't be disappointed. But there's nothing wrong with your current system, you shouldn't expect disk intensive activity to keep your CPU busy.

Already happened; "They think it's all over, it is now."

It's like being savaged by a pack of chihuahuas. You go girl!

Present it. I'll be at Perris next weekend. edit to remove quote

P.S. the article didn't make it clear am I supposed to take the cherries orally or use them as suppositories?

No way, I'm gonna go out and buy some cherries, my ass needs all the help it can get.

She survived, she was unconscious for about 30 minutes. The Chinese guy flying near her was killed, but I heard from another source that his cause of death was a lightning strike.

A rig?

And how would you know?