36,000 acres of turbines to power only 150,000 homes? Seems incredibly inefficient...

I'll start off slightly off topic but there's a point coming.

I always think that anyone who says "with the economy the way it is" doesn't really understand the economy.The economy is always the way it is. For every person who is losing money, there is someone gaining. What's bad for one company is good for another. One industry shrinks, another grows. The price/value of something goes up and down, benefiting and harming someone all of the time. Every winning business idea/plan soon becomes a loser, every successful business that grows, grows to the point of losing control. Every great product is eventually superseded by something better. Every business is based on exploiting something or someone.

The point I'll make is that if this kind of constant chaos and turmoil creates fear and anxiety in you, maybe you need to get out of the economy and go back to a much more basic and rewarding lifestyle. Maybe retire, or join a commune, live in a monastery, or set out on an adventure, hitchhike the world, sail the oceans, climb mountains. Stuff that REALLY matters and nourishes the mind and soul.

What produced the mindset that there must not be any blown up/hijacked/whatever planes no matter what? This baffles me.

If lessening these ridiculous security measures means the occasional plane gets blown up or driven into some tower, I'm willing to take that risk. I recognize that, statistically, I'm more likely to accidentally drown in my own bathtub or get hit by a car while walking down the street. And I don't know if this is just me, but the thought of being on one of those planes doesn't frighten me? If it happens to me it happens to me, I'll do my best to fight the attackers and land the plane but if I die then so be it.

In many places in the world this sort of thing goes on every day. Hell, the US blows up a lot of ordinary and innocent people every day.

If most Americans were polled on this would they side with the increased security in return for giving up their rights and freedoms? Has anyone actually polled them on this question? How is this happening?

The iPod may be easy to use, but the iTunes interface sucks big time in terms of usability. It's the total opposite of the iTunes philosophy, if you ask me. I don't think Steve Jobs has ever had to use iTunes, I think he'd have an aneurysm if he had.

Amen to that. The FPS and RTS genres fucked it up. Suddenly, all the industry wanted was shoot'em-ups and blow'em-ups, catering almost exclusively to the lowest common denominator. Gaming became like television, a way to waste time in some brain dead activity that reduced you to a twitching zombie-like state.

I miss the turn-based strategy games in particular.

If you ask me, marriage is one of the dumbest inventions of mankind. It was invented by religion, it rarely has anything to do with love in my experience.

Why on earth would you put arbitrary boundaries and conditions on love? Who are you to dictate to anyone who they may or may not love, when, whyfor and whatever? Moreover, who are you to tell your lover they can't love someone else?

But forget all that - why enter an "agreement" where both of you have only the vaguest notion of what the other thinks it entails? Way to set yourself up for all sorts of problems.

No, more...why are you marrying THAT PERSON? Fuck, they just want the ring, house, car, 1.5 kids, it's the status they want, because it's fashionable to be married, or there are financial benefits to it, you're merely secondary to that, collateral.

It's a pathetically boring script - A meets B, A and B date for a while, A and B get engaged, A and B get married, get a house, car, pop out some kids, etc. Because, well, because that's just how it's done, how everyone else does it, because, y'know?

Yup. And by the way, how much do you want to bet all this is coming soon to a neighbourhood near you.

I don't think it's considered a "real death". In the military, towelheads don't count as real people.

Actually, the society portrayed in Star Trek (e.g. no greed) is feasible to me, but perhaps that's because I'm not greedy/selfish myself. I love my job because I love what I do. If I didn't get paid for it, I would still be doing it. I've found that not many people can't begin to comprehend that, and I feel sad for them. The society portrayed in Star Trek is a society of people like me, where everyone has found their niche, works for love of their craft, has no need for accumulating material wealth and possessions, etc.

At the root of all of this bullshit is the selfish desire for more of something than anyone else has, to one-up, to compete, to p0wn, exploit, to have and wield power over others.

I seriously think we need to rig society in such a way that selfishness is effectively disadvantaged. We can start with a money-free economy, that'll remove 95% of the sociopathy discussed here. People can go back to doing what they do for love of craft rather than love or need for money.

Someone here mentioned that no matter what happens in the management levels, the bottom levels keep the company operating and moving forward. Perhaps we need to remove the management levels in order to improve efficiency. If a company can operate without managers, and I bet it can, then so can all levels of society and civilization.

No, it was a rebuke of warmongering. Notice the "peace" in the "Nobel Peace Prize." Bush, with his swashbuckling "with us or against us" saber rattling "bomb 'em to the stone age", "bring 'em awn" approach was as warmongering and belligerent as they came. Given any number of solutions, he chose a military solution by default over anything else. He spurned diplomacy, choosing Bolton as UN rep,, who distinctly and publicly despised both diplomacy and the UN. Not only that, the Bush administration actively set out to weaken the UN.

Obama is a much more reasonable person to deal with, thus the rest of the world is relieved and can breathe easier. The award really belongs to those Americans who voted Obama, but I wholeheartedly agree with it anyway.

You know what. All advertised products, targeted or not, are things you simply don't need. The point of advertising is to create the perceived need, on your part, out of nothing. And the perceived need isn't a need but a desire, and that's the point - to create the desire and confuse you into thinking it's a need. And you know they do it very well, the magic spell of advertising works on you.

You live in a consumerist society, you're nobody, worthless, if you don't have what everyone else has, and have your toys to play with, to distract you from better things that you should be doing instead - like, I dunno, revolution or doing things for the betterment of mankind. That's where advertising gets its power. To defeat advertising, stop being a society based on property, money, consumption and greed.

Yeah, I stopped playing PC games for the same reasons, plus the fact that nowadays they're all tactical (e.g. FPS) and dumbed down rather than strategic and engaging. They've become just another variation of television. There are no games out there for people like me who like realism and learning curves.

Contrary to what other posters have been saying, there's definitely glory in IT. Glory is when you save a company millions of bucks, or when everyone loves you because you make their jobs easier, save them time, or when people come to you with problems and go away with solutions. Usually this sort of scenario takes place at small to mid-sized companies, not at mega-corporations.

Seriously, you do NOT want to have to deal with Bell Canada customer service or support for any reason whatsoever. They are legendary for the atrocious level of customer care, for bilking their customers, for owing customers money but never giving it back, for simply getting every last little thing amazingly wrong, for the amounts of pain inflicted and for their sheer level of unfairness.

I remember when I got my first telephone line back in the mid-80's, within months I had an unexplained and impossible charge, and I simply couldn't contest the charge - it was either pay it plus (growing) interest or have no phone.

My god, recently I moved to an apartment and had to endure two months of support calls to get my line moved too, and a Bell representative tried to sell me something called Line Insurance - basically, for an extra $20/mo it would guarantee that this sort of thing didn't happen. They wanted to charge me extra to ensure that I got what I already paid for! Can you imagine?!

No, Bell Canada is evil incarnate and must die.