+1 funny

+1 Funny.

all of a sudden, AT&Ts 3G service was unavailable for days (not hours) at a time. This was not in a remote area, but in a suburb 25 miles due west of Philadelphia, PA. At the time, signal bars were up at 5. Go figure. 3G service eventually did return, though.

I like the iPhone, but if their 3G service is so spotty, I might eventually be forced to switch providers.

AT&T are you listening?

Just to clarify, since the content of this thread is starting to fall under the category of "non-falsifiable religious belief", the idea of verifiable "truth" or "falseness" doesn't really come into play. So, saying something is "true" in this context, at best means that you "believe it to be true" to you, and to the other members of your faith. It cannot be independently verified via the scientific method to be "true" or "false" (not "true").

On the other hand, the two catchy phrases are inherited from a number of qualities and behaviors that have been observed in adherents of those religions, and may actually be statistically verifiable.

For example, Protestants have the the Puritan "work-ethic" driven by the idea that God "blesses" his chosen or "saved" ones with hard-earned wealth. Many Catholics have guilt complexes over things that typically hurt nobody. For example, eating meat on Fridays in Lent, breaking restrictions on various sexual activity, etc.

These are real and measurable psychological phenomenon. So, oddly enough, the claims that those catchy phrases made, actually have the capability to be measured. In contrast, the claims that the dogma makes do not.

Yet.

No doubt that some of the current mainstream religions are responsible for mindsets which very well might not just cause their members to go extinct, but also be undoing of everyone who doesn't follow them, as well. Sometimes just believing in an apocalypse might just happen to bring one on.

I'm using spamhaus exclusively now. After discontinuing SORBS, I might get at most 10 spams a day.

I'd stopped using SORBS awhile back, after numerous instances of it flagging real email as spam. Since then, the amount of UCE that I've been receiving since has actually *gone down*. Go figure.

So.

We are *already* pwned by them and all they need to do is call in the IOUs. But what would calling in the those IOUs look like?

There's no way they'd be able to successfully mount a land or sea invasion with their 20 million surplus men, and I'd doubt if they'd be prepared to nuke us to enforce it. If they'd use nukes, we would retaliate, and what's left of them would have to deal with the subsequent nuclear winter and short-term (100-200 year) radiation threat, just as much as we would.It's just not good for business.

Perhaps the result is that people recognize us for the paupers we currently are, and our existing domestic economy (i.e. way of doing things) irrevocably goes into the shitter.

At that point, after all of the social and political unrest eventually quiets down, a decreased number of us start the whole process over again in a diminished capacity.

Count yourself lucky that you got to live in a relatively quiet time for at least a little while.

You have to go back at least 10000 years (maybe more) to when we were hunter-gatherers for that. As soon as agriculture happened, we all started to work for someone else.

You mean like this

That is, no animal life except for four really curious, resourceful, and tenacious penguins.

The Mutter Museum is right in downtown Philly, you should check it out before you leave or when you get back.

It's chock full of medical curiosities. I think it is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. A must see.

It's not like we're not allowed to upgrade a machine to IE8. Instead, for us, some of our intranet sites no longer work correctly with IE8. So, if you want to access them you better stay at IE7.

For example, IBM's Maximo Asset management product is not yet supported for IE8 at Maximo release 6.2. Most things do work, but there are a number of things (like the cascading links off of the "Start Center" menu) that do not. No biggie, though - the thing doesn't work for Firefox at all. And the "Back" button in IE causes the Maximo page to hang - you have to exit the tab or window, and then reenter the site via the main URL, then navigate back to where you were.

As a result, I'll need to keep my version of IE at 7 - for now.

There's an app for that.