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As a matter of personal opinion, I would go to jail today rather that be conscripted regardless of how much they offered. I don't think the current wars will do anything but upset more people and convince them to join the terrorists. For every one we kill, we make 3 more harmless citizens mad enough to strap bombs to themselves. I won't go to war for that. That way lies death without cause.

I wish that smart people could be the only ones in government. I also wish only people who actually cared what happened to other people could be in government. The truth is, though, that no matter how you work the system there will eventually be idiots and self serving pompose......... Well any ways, things will never be the way they need to be until we can identify intelligence as a gene and start bringing up the average IQ.

How intolerant and bloodthirsty can you get? This is the most convoluted and disturbed logic I can read without hanging myself. Blowing up an entire region? Because a handful of suicidal extremists might be there? Get real.

Veni veni venias, neme mori fascias!
Sephiroth, use Omnislash, Catastrophy, and Bloodfest, you can kill all three forms then you finish with that little extra thing where you can't possibly die, you just use your limit, or he uses his and you counter with yours. Anyways this is way to easy.
And as for the Kirby tree, I've got you both pwned. Use double Ice kirby to create an ice shield, you kill him and none of his attacks get anywhere near you. :P

I get that you think that calling him half white takes something away from African Americans, but medically he is not entirely of African descent. There is nothing wrong with that, my cousin is half African American, and she displays all the external features of being entirely African American. Anyways, just saying that he is half white doesn't take anything away from the African American community, since the fact that a white person and a black person married and had kids is just one more step towards America forgetting the difference. What does it matter that half of him is white? He is still a very, very big step towards unity.

In response to the questions of how it would be affected by nervousness or meditation, I believe the lie detector of the future is an FMRI. Read the activity of the brain to determine whether the "remember" part of the brain is working or whether the "imagine" part of the brain is working. This would be much more difficult to lie to since it would not be impacted by anything external.

At 11/6/08 04:50 PM, AapoJoki wrote:

At 11/6/08 04:45 PM, JeremieCompNerd wrote: You know, theoretically a candidate with 74% of the popular vote could still LOSE the electoral collage? Think about it, 50 states. 24 of them vote 100% A, and 26 of them vote 51% B. B would win, even though 74% of the population wanted A. Wouldn't that suck? Just food for thought.

You forgot that all states have different amount of electorates. You can win the election simply by winning "26 of the states", if they don't have enough electoral votes.

And now that I look at your post again, it looks like you also seem to be counting as if every state has equally many citizens. wtf?

True, true, if you put all of the states voting A as being the high number states and B as low or vice versus, but if you divide them down the middle with the state with the most electoral votes being team B, second best being A, third is B, fourth A and so on until it's over then the basic principle of what I said still holds true. I admit it is an incredible long shot, never ever going to happen, but the fact that it is mathematically possible is entirely rediculous and is very compelling evidence to scrap the system.

If they ever do get foolproof lie detectors, there will be many uses for them. Find people who are guilty, ask politicians if they intend to keep their promises, ask employees if they are capable of handling the job....... Right up until someone decides to start asking questions they have no right to know the answer to. Imagine if you could ask someone yes or no questions to arrive at any secret they have regardless of what that secret is. Imagine someone getting this machine out of the building and using it on people who have nothing legally to hide, but have personal information they don't want to share...... I have no problem with their use in courtrooms, but nobody should have access to that kind of technology for personal use and it will be difficult to keep it off the street.
"Does your social security number start with a 6?"

You know, theoretically a candidate with 74% of the popular vote could still LOSE the electoral collage? Think about it, 50 states. 24 of them vote 100% A, and 26 of them vote 51% B. B would win, even though 74% of the population wanted A. Wouldn't that suck? Just food for thought.

First off I'd like to point out that I, for some reason or other, still have a prop8 thread that I can read, other than this one, so if nobody else can see the original for whatever reason I would be happy to copy paste the original to allow review.
In the meantime, I'd like to comment that for everyone who thinks that calling m/f unions "weddings" and calling m/m or f/f unions " civil unions" that sounds dangerously close to "separate but equal". Not something most people would be proud of associating with.

So sad what the world has come to that we have made such a public fool of ourselves in front of the other nations. And against our own public interest to boot!

Excellent! Now we get into the meat of the problem.... I understand that most people don't like the idea of a salary cap, but from what I hear of your comments that is because certain jobs require excessive spending. I never said you wouldn't make more than 5 mill a year, I said you wouldn't make more than 5 mill a year personal net profit. In other words, if you make 10 million but donate 5 to cancer research, you only made 5. If you make 20 and start a 10 million dollar buissiness, you only made 10. See? Buissiness can be made to flourish in a situation like this because the individual doesn't have the option of buying a 15 million dollar yacht. Why anybody would do that anyways is beyond me, but whatever, rich people still do it so it's still a problem. And I think someone misread my post talking about 500,000 being the cap, they forgot a 0. Five hundred thousand is enough for any normal person to live quite well on, but my suggested cap was ten times that. 5 mill a year is decadent. Anyways, if this clarification doesn't fill in the gaps you needed, keep pointing out holes! I'll get there eventually. Thanks for writing, JCN

Hahaha! I never really thought to view it like that. All that work fixing it and your toaster just up and leaves! What a joke. Lucky me I'm smart enough not to wind up with a 5,000 dollar doorstop.

I'm playing FFVII at the moment, but I also have a lot of old SNES and NES games.

At 11/5/08 04:36 PM, n64kid wrote:
So besides this being stupid in reality, I mean.... what's the point of being a venture capitalist? But why should someone who gives 100% of their income to the government have the same say as people who make under 50,000 who don't pay taxes. Seeing how the average income is roughly 40,000, you're saying the majortiy should decide how to spend the minority's money? How is this fair? Why can't the tax payers decide how to spend their taxed income and leave the tax dodgers out of it?

I never said they would give 100% of their income to the government. I said they would give 100% of whatever they made beyond 5 million a year, because no human should be allowed to make more than that. What would you do with 5 million dollars? Really? It's just wasteful. The extra would go to the government, and you would have a large say in what they did with it. And where did I say the majority should decide how to spend the minorities money? If by "minority" you mean people with way too much money, by "majority" you mean people with no money, and by "decide how to spend" you mean give the "minority" a choice between several perfectly good public projects for the betterment of America to spend their incredibly excessive wealth on, then I suppose the majority should have a say in the spending of the wealthy minority. Thanks for the question though!

A part of it is that under this plan you would have the right to choose how the government spent 75% of your excess profits. Another part is that nobody should ever need more than 5 mil to do whatever they want. What's the point of earning that kind of money? It's not like you appreciate it. Once you pass a certain point you have all the luxery and technology you can enjoy, and beyond that you're just coating your trash with gold so you'll have something to stick your diamonds on, and forgetting how many houses you actually own.... Where's the need?
Anyways, it's good to know that someone actually read all the work I put into that. Thanks for commenting!

Doesn't anybody want to say something about this? More than a hundred wasted posts confirming that Obama is president, something I knew since before the primaries, and nobody wants to debate that this kind of drastic tax reform could work? Or could kill us all? Or something, anything? Really, where is your spirit of curiosity? I'd rather be flamed by L3373RS than just ignored...... It's not like I'm saying this is perfect, that's why I need people to comment so I can find out what it needs. If you hate it, say something. If you like it, say that too. Just POST ALREADY!

At 11/4/08 08:15 PM, Chavic wrote:

I'm not talking about before the big bang, I'm talking the very beginning of the big bang. Anyways, so you are claiming that time started when the singularity suddenly appeared for no reason and exploded into the universe?

Well, I think I might take a crack at this one....
Look at it like breathing. The universe breathes out, thats the big bang. Energy, having no physical mass, existing with no physical mass, becomes physical mass just like a nuke going backwards. Small amounts of matter become large amounts of energy, so it is logical that the reverse is true as well. Large amounts of energy become mass under certain conditions. So, once all this mass is created in one spot and explodes, it creates the physical universe. Then the mass slows down. It all gets pulled back together by gravity and other forces, and collapses into a massive singularity. This gets smaller and more and more dense until in all the universe there is only this tiny bubble of mass and energy. It continues to collapse, crushing the mass, until there is nothing left but a very small amount of matter, and a very large amount of energy. This would be the big crunch, as I understand it, and would result in another bang. There is no beginning, because much like a snake swallowing it's own tail one event causes the other. A paradox to be sure, but only because we see time as only moving in one direction. If you view mass and energy, or rather the dual existance of the two as being only one or the other but perfectly substituted for one another, as always having existed and always continuing to exist, and can truly understand the concept of "absolutely no beggining whatsoever end of story it was always always always........ always..... always..... (trails off but continues in the background) here" then you realize there is the very real possibility that the big crunch causes the big bang which causes the big crunch and so on. Therefor, there was no "before the big bang" since before that was another one, and another one. Get it?
"always....always....always....."

I don't see why so many people feel the need to start topics that are just there to bash something. If you hate Naruto, stop publicizing it and hope it goes away. Many people like the fight scenes, or the storylines, or the depth of the characters, or the cool art. I like it. There aren't many episodes I don't like, and those are the filler episodes on CN at the moment. Most people who hate Naruto haven't watched the start. Up until Sasuke left, the show was really cool. It will be again when Shippuuden starts soon. Don't start topics saying you hate something unless it has something in it to be hated besides a personal opinion. You could misconstrue Naruto's sexy jutsu as homosexual propaganda, or dislike the language in the Japanese dubs, or any number of engaging conversations besides just saying the show isn't any good. At least put some kind of effort into it..... You might as well have wrote your arguement in L337.

At 11/4/08 05:06 PM, Chavic wrote:
Making amino acids is hardly evidence. It can't yet be proved either way, so both points are equally valid.
Most of science is based on theories and assumptions anyways. We can't yet properly blend classic and quantum physics.

For there to have been a big bang there has to be a time when the laws of physics didn't exist, but as far as ANYONE has observed, the laws of physics always apply. But it is still widely accepted as the beginning of the universe.

How is this any different then me believing there is a God?

Both theories pose the same questions: What came before God? What came before the Big Bang?

looks like my logic is better than yours.

Not better, even by what you yourself admit. If both options pose the same questions, then your logic is at best equal in every way, not better. Just something to point out. :)

I think there is a way to do both. Don't stop curing people. Continue to improve medicine wherever possible because that is the fastest way to prolong the problem. While medicine holds the illnesses at bay, though, we need to work on changing the human genome. We need to know what codes affect immunity in the DNA. Then, we need to mandate that all children born after a certain date be adjusted to be completely immune to all illnesses currently known. It may be 300 years from now when that happens, and another hundred while the older people without the treatment die, but sooner or later the entire population would be bacteria and virus free. I do think, however, that when you do ANYTHING on a global scale, especially messing with the basics of who we are, you should keep the blueprints for the old version. Just in case we need to back up a few steps, we should keep a viable population of eggs unmodified and stored. Not the easiest way to go, but it's the only way to correct an error of that scale if we find out fifty years down the line that we messed with something we didn't want. Anyway, if you want evolution without death, we don't have a lot of other options than to manually pick and make the changes we need. And I agree, it's irresponsible to keep postponing mass death with medicine, and immoral to allow people to die just to get rid of weak genes.

Many people hate taxes. No matter how necessary it is, nobody wants to give away money. I have a unique way of looking at the world, and would like to share this idea with you. Feel free to tear my idea apart and prove me wrong with all vigor, since every time an idea is proved incomplete it can be rebuilt better than ever. I want your honest opinion. This is how I believe taxes should be done.

1. Take the minimum living expenses of the area in question. What amount of money does it take each year to keep your house, car, food, electric, water, gas, and other necessities running? I don't know the official figure, and it would vary based on state or even county economy. Let's call it 50k. If 50k is what it takes to stay alive and healthy each year, then you pay NO TAXES on the first 50 thousand dollars you make that year. That way, the government can't touch money that you need to survive.

2. Reasonable savings. What about saving money for an accident? Medical expenditures, insurance, a small emergency cash deposit? We will call this 10k. Ten thousand dollars is more than enough to provide for any reasonable emergency as far as I am aware. I don't know exact numbers so like the 50k estimate this number is only hypothetical. For this money, which is required for comfort but not for basic survival, taxes will be very little. Pennies on the dollar of this money would be taken for taxes. Let's say you make 55k this year, you keep 50k for living, and the 5k for your emergency funds and insurance would be taxed a small amount, likely around 2-5%. The 2-5% would only apply to 5k, and have no effect at all on the 50K you need to survive. So even if you made 50,001 dollars, you would pay taxes, but only a few cents. With me so far?

3. Entertainment. Going to the movies twice a month, eating out, satelite TV, all the modern parts of modern living. Taking the kids to Disney. This is where you start to see taxes pick up. This is money you would burn on things that have little to do with survival. This is money you don't have to have. So this money, let's say 20,000 dollars, is taxed higher than money having to do with living. The money you make from 60k to 80k would be taxed 10-15%. This is, like the reasonable savings tax, only applied to the money between 60-80k.

4. Exceptional lifestyle. Above 80k, again not a definate number I'm just trying to list numbers to keep this all clear and easy to understand, would be exceptional lifestyle. You can eat out at fancy restaraunts, you can go on travel cruises, you can enjoy life. This is great money, so taxes on this are equally great. 15-25%. This is money to burn, so if you make 75 cents on the dollar that's still 75 cents you didn't have to go buy jewlery with. From 80k to about 200k would be plenty of wiggle room for this lifestyle and would be taxed as such.

5. Massive amounts of money. If you make 200k a year, that is GREAT money. You don't have to worry about nearly anything, so from 200k to 500k would be taxed in the 25-40% range. At this point, you can afford it. This is where your income now starts to pay for the first 50k you keep for free. You really can't complain, since at this point if you earn 500k a year before tax, you get 50k for free, the next 10k you pay 200-300 dollars, the next 20k you pay 2000-3000 dollars, then 120k paying 18-30k, and finally 300k paying 75k-120k. Wich puts you, earning 500k, at earning between 405,800 dollars and 346,700. That's what you take home. If you can complain about taking home nearly 350k, you are really messed up.

6. More money than you know what to do with. Beyond 500k a year, the taxes fast increase. Every 500k the taxes on the next 500k should increase by 5-10%. So by the time you're making several million dollars a year, everything above a certain point goes to the government. Nobody should have more than 5 million dollars a year. If I had 5 million dollars this year I could retire today and never work again. This is excessive to the point of nearly vulgar, and you're total takeaway would be 5 million at most, ever. There is no need to have any more than that, ExxonMobile Board of Directors.

7. Now that everyone has paid their income taxes, and now that those taxes are increased based on what they are likely to be used for, there should no longer be a need for any other kind of tax. We already covered not taxing food money with the tax free initial 50k, we already covered heavily taxing yachts by heavily taxing the money that goes towards buying them. We no longer need the rediculous system of taxing extra at the register. It is outdated and has long since lost all purpose.

8. What to do with these taxes? Many people don't like the way the government chooses to spend their money. I have an answer to that as well. 25% of our taxes should go to the government no questions asked. They can use that to fund whatever they need, such as paying their staff and funding unpopular or our-of-sight-out-of-mind projects. The remaining 75% of a persons taxes are to be used EXACTLY as the tax payer asks. If you believe that teachers are not being paid enough, you can check the education box and mark what percentage of your taxes are to be spent on education. Tired of money being wasted on road work? Don't check the box. They might use the 25% of your money that has no stipulations attached, if they so choose, but they can't touch the bulk of your taxes. At least 75% of your hard earned tax money goes to what you think America needs.

9. What about families? As I said, all of these numbers are based on what the household needs for each category. A single man may live off X dollars a year, and need Y dollars insurance, and spend Z dollars on reasonable entertainment. A family of 12 would have far larger expenses needing a larger house, vans, way more food, need to take more people to the movies, need a larger medical insurance policy to deal with more kids getting sick and breaking bones. The amount of tax applied to each stage of money usage would stay the same, but the numbers for where you enter and exit each stage might change. They would change again as more kids moved out, or where born. Everyone pays the taxes that are fair to them, allowing them to survive easier during rough times, and keeping anybody from having more money than they should ever reasonably be allowed to have.

Many people will think that this is socialism, or communism, or Marxism, or whatever else they can think of. The truth is, this method of taxing takes care of the little guy, allows for a great deal of wealth, and provides more than enough money for the government. I know it has flaws, I am sure many people will flame me, or tear all kinds of holes in my arguement. I'm prepared for both. I want to know how this system can be improved. I want to know what is wrong with it. I want to know how it could be implemented in stages so as not to destroy what little economy we have left. Give me everything you've got. I'll take it all, and make this idea even better. And some day, when this idea can be made to stand against our current system and put it to shame, we will start a petition to have this written as the future of our country. A future where there is incentive to work hard, protection for those who have yet to succeed, and as little room to use legal language to cheat the system as possible.

People keep bringing up that amino acids are only building blocks and it's difficult to get them to form organic life.... Well duh! Rocks occur in nature all the time, but you almost never see one shaped like a human nose. If you look hard enough, however, you may eventually find any number of odd and highly unlikely shapes of stone. It is perfectly logical that given an unlimited amount of time any and all possible combinations of atoms in any and all sizes and shapes can and will occur. It is even, however rediculous it may seem, very likely that given the full scope of eternity there will eventually be a cloud of exactly the right materials collapsing at exactly the right location to create a bubble of water, simple H2O, a great deal of exactly the right kind of nutrients, and a perfectly formed seed, therefor creating a huge plant growing in space for no reason. It won't happen in our lifetimes, or that of our species, our galaxy, or even this current universe for that matter since it will likely be many crunches and bangs away, but sooner or later every possible infinite combination of potential atomic formations will occur. It is fact. It is fact, because the universe will continue to contract and expand until those forms occur. Then, it will keep going anyways, repeating itself perpetually. People who believe it is impossible to produce life spontaneously are simply incapable of truly understanding the concept of infinite. I'm not saying it's not also possible that a God created all this, only that it could happen without one. I'm not saying people who choose to believe that evolution is impossible are in any way mentally inferior, since it took me a long time to come to terms with the definition of eternity. I'm not even saying that there is such a thing as an infinite, repeating universe, only that as we have learned about the universe there is evidence to suggest that this is the likely role of the universe and that we have yet find proof otherwise.

Looking at this topic and seeing how many people spend so much time on here, and also how many have less than a thousand posts, I have to wonder how a person would know if they truly have the right to post in this thread... I don't, I know that because I've posted hardly at all, and recieved no hatemail just yet. I would be interested to know if the handful of people who have earned the forums respect, and therefor the right to post here, might consider PMing those who have earned their wings but do not yet know it. I would love to one day be invited to converse, but I would be loath to intrude where unwanted. If ever I do make the cut, and I say this on behalf of all those who are new, would you let me know?

Alright, I now have an artist! We have art, and music, and a wicked original idea. All we need now is someone with some programming muscle. Anybody? Don't be afraid to speak up!

I agree entirely with your theory, but I wouldn't call it slavery. Maturity training period, or life training, or something like that. You don't want to p*s* people off with a good idea. Also, much like communism in it's original form, the one that came just before actually using it, this is a great idea that will get r*p*d by pathetic excuses for humans who think they can profit excessively from it. It would eventually lead to a more accurate form of slavery, which would of course result in a complete turnaround. People who are smart enough to see how bad it is at that point would then be made slaves by the rich idiots. The ones who's rich parents of today will buy them past the test you set tomorrow. See? No matter how good your idea is, no matter how well you market it, it will eventually bite you in the *s*. I do wish something could be done like this, but I also fear what will happen if it does manage to succeed.

At 10/26/08 04:36 AM, flyingtiger wrote:
Aren't we talking about "primordial soup" conditions? The ocean would be a pretty huge primordial soup. I've always felt its size would make the solution too dilute for anything to happen.

If these amino acids are forming inside volcanic pools, then that's probably where the first self-replicating substance formed. If they enter the ocean, they are never reacting with each other to form anything higher. I think that's obvious (though I suppose I could be wrong).

Only if you don't include the obvious concept that once the organisms are self replicating then even in a vast ocean they will eventually multiply enough to have a rather good chance of finding eachother.

It's a hundred thousand light years in diameter.

Well, some civilizations would obviously precede ours by many years, giving time for their signals to reach us. 50,000 years or whatever is a small amount of time, and so it's unlikely we're the first within that time period to obtain maturity, especially since the Sun isn't even that old compared to a lot of stars. Anyway, I just don't think the great silence is expected considering how plausible the proponents of abiogenesis like to make it seem. One would expect life to be everywhere, including intelligent life--but where the heck are they? It basically seems to confirm what the skeptics here are saying, that even with lots of time, it's still extremely, incredibly unlikely.

How do you know that life on other planets would occur before us? Or more specifically, that they would survive long enough to reach the level of technology we have reached without blowing themselves up just like we have already come close to. When you are working with timeframes of many trillion years there is almost no chance of a civilization surviving to find another civilization within the infinite size of the universe. You can make mistakes in the process of randomly generating organic life from inorganic compounds all day long for many hundred thousand years and still have nothing until it all fits together in one fateful day. Or you could get it right on the first day and the planet is still forming so the organism is destroyed. Or you could have the organic life form at the last minute, and the star the planet orbits explodes before the lifeform reaches interstellar travel. The odds of a lifeform being created from inorganic compounds are very, very, very low. But given an unlimited amount of time there is a guaranteed chance of it happening somewhere. Imagine a deck of cards. You can deal cards for an entire lifetime and never, ever get the entire deck to shuffle into the order of Ace-King of Spades, of Hearts, of Diamonds, then of Clubs. But if you randomly shuffle the deck every single time, and do so for ALL ETERNITY, you will sooner or later deal that deck. After all, it has the same odds of occurence as any other specific deck. Just because we haven't seen other lifeforms yet doesn't mean they don't exist since they could be on the far side of the galaxy, or even way off on the far side of the farthest galaxy from us! The odds are slim, but they are also inevitable.

Though I had never heard of this experiment before I have long postulated that we could create artificial lifeforms. I don't think it would be that hard really to take the same amounts of each element that would be found in a very simple lifeform and mix them in a vial. Within six months of the proper temperature and mixture being very slowly turned and mixed something would be bound to pop up. Amino acids, maybe an enzyme, something. I'm a little shocked it's been done already way back then and there hasn't been a followup, if I had headed that project I'd have stuck with it till I died trying to prove that it could be done given enough time. Sure would shut some nutjobs up. (Not just religious ones either so don't flame me)

Scratch that, I sent him the details and he decided he didn't want to/ couldn't help...... Oh well. Any other takers?

Yes, I am a bit nervous about someone taking the idea and forgetting to mention where they got it.... but as long as I have a PM proving the IDEA, and the idea alone, was mine I have absolutely no intentions of taking credit for the work involved. I can perfectly understand if someone wants to impose similar restrictions on me, such as my PMing them an affirmation that they did the work on the project and not me. I have already sent the idea to LostVoices though, so with any luck he will agree to begin the project and we can move on to finding an artist.