-Lexus-

THANK YOU. I happen to be a conservative, but everyone like me seems to think that national defense is off limits. For god sakes people, what poses a solid threat to us outside of some terrorists in the middle east (militarily)? We have bases scattered across the globe and we're the ones who should be cowering in fear of the little tin-pot dictatorships? Please. It's like we can't cut anything out of it without being called flag burners. Yeah, you guys could definitely cut back on the R&D department. Who the heck needs GPS guided bullets anyways. Its totally useless in guerrilla warfare. Stop researching new weapons and technology for like a few years, and use that money to pay of the debts. America has a technological advantage over everyone else anyways, and I doubt waiting a few years will suddenly cause the Chinese and Russians to have 50 ft tall nuclear powered death robots.

Google apparently even went a step further. The cars that make the photos from Google Street view have some kind of thing that detects wireless internet and stuff. So apparantly they managed to download all kinds of personal data from these (unprotected) networks. Google claims it was a software error, as it was only supposed to detect the networks and not actually invade them or something. They are getting a fine for this now. Anyways, information is worth a lot of money these days, so youll have big companies trying to get, without telling you, as much as information about you as possible.

I take it your new to multiplayer? You just type minecraft.gawilson.net in the IP address bar. No downloads required. It should work, if it didn't then it was either down or the minecraft.net servers that authenticate your user profile were down. Happens quite often, especially on days when updates come out. I'm glad to see more interest Oh thanks about the trap tip. Im currently playing on easiest, so no mob spawns anyways. Im having way to much fun building large buildings. Its just to bad that building stuff out of sandstone takes a while. Digging up all the sand/sandstone takes a while And Multiplayer sounds interesting. Think Im gonna take a look at that too

From all the email adresses Ive used, I actually only got a lot of spam on my Yahoo account. Mostly about hot shemales doing things to other people. Then again, I used that account to register to all the sites that looked a little...risky. Anyways, gmail is pretty good at filtering out most of the spam. I only get emails from sites and people that I actually gave the adress. Hotmail used to work fine too, but lately those bots that take over other peoples accounts are becoming a little annoying. Nothing big yet though.

Its actually not that hard to avoid enemies. They generally only spawn in a certain light level, so just make sure everything is well lit, so they wont spawn. Except when youre in the other dimension thingy. Then light doesnt matter. But its to much of a pain to go after creepers. I dont like them suicide bombing me <_<

In the City by Detroit Diesel.

Whoo, lets not confuse terms here. Serfdom is something different then slavery, do not compare them. Though yes, slavery happened and happens all over the world, even though its officially illegal.

I love Minecraft! And yes, its super addictive XD Anyways, I was wondering how people get TNT all the time. I cant find it or the materials to make it.

Awesome music <3 Monopoly of Violence by The Peoples Republic of Europe

It remains to be seen though how effective occupying Afghanistan is in the fight against terrorist organizations. I mean, Al Qaida isnt bound to Aghanistan, its not like a normal government that can be destroyed or conquered. Chase them out of one country, and they will go to the next one. Without a significant change in the Muslim attitude towards the west and the things it stands for, I doubt it really matters what countries you invade. All it will do is cause more people to join Al Qaida. Then how to change the attitude towards the Islam? Total indifference towards the whole region would be the best. That means no more cheap oil by being good friends with the local dictator and no more supporting Israel in any way. Leave the whole region to rot. Only do something if they are so stupid to attack Europe or another non Islamic country or when they ask for our support like in Libya. Otherwise, treat them like we dont care what they do as long as they dont bother us. That would require a drastic change in US foreign policies and energy policies though, and I dont think the US has the will left to reinvent itself.

Good point, seeing how in America people are sent to straight camps to 'cure' them from being gay and stuff. I bet these kind of nutjobs wouldnt waste any time forcing gays to take anti gay pills to 'cure' them. No one is forced to go to those camps. They can't legally make you go; it's a choice. They arent physically forced no, but there are way more effective and traumatizing ways to do the same. Like telling your gay kid hes no longer part of the family if he doesnt get cured, or that he will burn and suffer for an eternity in the lake of fire if he continues in his gay ways. Social pressure is so much more effective, and the nice thing about it is that its pretty much always legal. Social pressure is an integral part of a civilized society; it upholds some cultural uniformity to bind the society together. You can't have everyone being 100% independent minded, or what you end up with is not a nation, but a mass of individuals all with conflicting agendas. Im not criticizing social pressure. Its not just an integral part of civilized society, its an integral part of being a healthy human. But that doesnt mean it cant be used as some weapon to make people do things that would normally go against their nature. Be it sending people to these fraudulent camps that claim to 'cure' people from being gay or orchestrating an ethnic cleansing, it can all be achieved with enough social pressure.

Strike Again by The Peoples Republic of Europe Kick that bass

Good point, seeing how in America people are sent to straight camps to 'cure' them from being gay and stuff. I bet these kind of nutjobs wouldnt waste any time forcing gays to take anti gay pills to 'cure' them. No one is forced to go to those camps. They can't legally make you go; it's a choice. They arent physically forced no, but there are way more effective and traumatizing ways to do the same. Like telling your gay kid hes no longer part of the family if he doesnt get cured, or that he will burn and suffer for an eternity in the lake of fire if he continues in his gay ways. Social pressure is so much more effective, and the nice thing about it is that its pretty much always legal.

Leptin does control weight and eating patterns in humans right? Its the hormone that tells us when we are full. Its just that with most obese people, they somehow stopped responding to Leptin or screwed up their Leptin production, causing them to eat more. My main point was more that there is no such thing as a soul or a spirit or something else that is inside you that is 'you'. You is nothing more then the result of a lot of structures in your body working together, adding up to be what you refer to as yourself. However, since these are natural physical structures they work according to certain rules, laws, etc causing you to be nothing more then the result of a really large sum of all kinds of different factors that force you to act in a certain way. Hence, there is no choice possible, its all already set out for you. But thats more a philosophical thing. Ah thank you for clearing that up. Like I said, the gaysite article and the Indian times article where horribly written. I havent actually had time to search for or read the journal one published by the researchers themselves. Thanks for the article. As I said, I hadnt had time to search or read it, and now that I have time you saved me a bit of time searching for it.

The mightiest nation in the world, can cripple itself this easily? Oh wow, how you guys managed to hold on for so long is just amazing Geez, toddlers would make for better elected government officials.

My current favorite hate is the Gillette razor ad with the disposable vs. the new model using a "random" actor of color. Demeans everyone's intelligence, and especially colored persons. Yeah, I never liked the Gillette razor ads either, but they are better then some of our beer ads. They have turned masculinity into some parody of itself, where the real man act like someone who has less brain matter then a retarded mouse. Then again, all our ads seem to be produced by a bunch of man hating feminists. Pretty much every ad these days has men either acting like stupid idiots or places them in some other submissive role compared to the female.

I dunno. It doesnt seem very Japanese to either dodge taxes or sue the government in this case. Its a totally different work ethic then in the West.

If its poison or something other deadly stuff, its half full, if its water or something else drinkable, its half empty. Sooo yeah, depends on the context...

Consumerism is what the keeps the economy working. Without consumerism, no economy = everyone poor and out of work. So in that sense, its quite necessary for our own good. I hate the ads though. I hate how after every 20-30 minutes there is a 7 minute ad block on tv. And most of them are just so incredibly stupid to watch. They try to be funny but all they generally achieve is that I start to strongly dislike the product they are advertising. They could tone it down a bit. At least, I wish they would do that.

Good point, seeing how in America people are sent to straight camps to 'cure' them from being gay and stuff. I bet these kind of nutjobs wouldnt waste any time forcing gays to take anti gay pills to 'cure' them.

Club Domination (Stahlfrequenz Remix) by Phosgore You gotta love the bass

Im back after being gone for about 9 months I guess..... Yeah I got bored with SC4 for a while and bored with a lot of websites in general. But now Im back again Gotta say, I like how the site is changed. Looks a lot cleaner now, and posting seems to be going a lot faster as well. I only wonder what happened with the tutorials. I kinda miss those.

It's ethical as long as no one's forced to do it. If we really believe that a person's body is their property and that said person has complete sovereignty over their body, it shouldn't be unethical for that person to alter the physiology of their body to better suit their tastes. Indeed. Its about as ethical as allowing people to have sex changes when they feel they were born in the wrong body. Still, it remains to be seen how many actually want to be changed and if you can effectively turn this into a cure. I mean, serotonin controls so much aspects of behavior, that I doubt you can just turn it into some pill.

Indeed. Further, has anyone repeated this experiment with the same result? Such reportage is contrary to proper science, and just makes for sensational (tabloid) journalism. The next thing you'll be having conservatives wanting to treat all gays with seratonin. As for preferences, probably there are none. Are mice able to express such things? All of their behavior is driven by hormones and neurotransmitters. I find it hard to find preference in that. That means you have no preference as well, since all your behavior is based on neurotransmitters and hormones as well. At best everything you do is chance, at worst only the result of an incredibly complex sum of factors that lead to you reacting in a certain way. Preference and choice are just illusions to prevent ourselves from accepting the horrible truth that you have no control whatsoever on your life and that existence has absolutely no point. But thats a whole other discussion And its a horribly written article. First the mice were made so that they wouldnt respond to serotonine, then you can cure them of their gayness by injecting serotonin directly into the brain Seems kinda contradictory. Still, you guys are kinda quick to denounce the whole research while I doubt any of you have actually know in any detail how the study was done, or that any of you have done any research in this area yourself.

If your point is that Americans need to get their heads out of the sand and pay attention to what is happening on the global stage, I agree with you. But I can tell you that many of us have only started to pay attention to what is happening on the national stage. Well, maybe I wasn't exactly thinking of "sand", but you are correct. Because of the insular (should I say isolationist) attitude that had been fostered since the beginning of the 20th century in America, it will be an uphill battle to make them more than locally aware. This is not helped by the news media who are entirely in the clutches of the marketing cartels. There are too many distractions with the doings of the entertainment industry, too many tabloid papers and magazines, and the information tsunami is beyond the ken of most people. They just can't cope with the information overload, and adding something like the Reuters and/or BBC feeds to their lives would probably be a bad thing, let alone the CBC, and we are only next door. The political stuff alone would be just a silly distraction for them, since you have your own problems, but would knowing what was really going on off-continent in other than the Hawaiian island group find any ears? I seriously doubt it. Just as a matter of instance, what do you think the average Joe thinks about the Fukushima mess beyond thinking, "It's not my problem", and "I hate nuclear power."? Do they think of the human cost? The economic cost? What about the general Japanese disaster? Up here, some automobile plants are closing (including Chrysler) for want of parts that are not shipping from Japan. Does Mr. America notice? Maybe your problem is now the "huddled masses" you now have on your hands. Dont think its much better outside America. Sure, the average European might be a little better informed then the average American, but in most cases its only a bit. Do you think most Europeans know about the consequences of the disaster in Japan, let alone care about them? Most of them know that there was a tsunami and that the reactor is damaged but other then that they dont know or care. And honestly I dont blame people for not caring that much about the specific details. If youre a farmer in America or Europe, or if youre working at a construction site, what does all the specific information mean to you? Why would you care about the details that have no significance for your life? Not knowing stuff only becomes a problem when you have to choose or act on something and you do not have the information needed to make a fully informed decision. And trust me, that doesnt only happen in America. It happens in Europe just as much.