Well if you go to Pawn Stars, I reckon they would tell you it was worth one thousand and then offer you 50 cents. =)

What is the interest of another in your own life but a string of anecdotes and experiences, emotions or shared actions and interests? Pretentious reckoning of what another person is thinking or feeling, another meaningless tool in the bag of tricks of someone who is more likely to concern themselves with their own ego's health and vitality than that of his fellow man. Not being a theist yourself, and having I am guessing in the realm of personal experiences with any very little direct knowledge, you like many atheists satisfy your own minds delight in wagging a finger in the faces of anything remotely resembling the meta-gnostic or metaphysical, cordoning yourself in the limitless expanse of your own perceptions and experiences.

Atheists have plenty of hang-ups brother, as evidenced in some of the most virulent spit-popping imaginable.

At what point during the fall do you reckon it dawned on him that this probably wasn't going to end well for anybody. I mean, he did have a while to evaluate his decision making while gravity did its work.

Also: Watsky? Seriously? Didn't expect that.

Might be a good time to plug out the electrical appliances I reckon.

I reckon that's a good prank to get punched in the face depending on what city you try that shit in.

I'm not sure she really means this. If it's not her actual opinion (I reckon it isn't) it's basically just viral advertising for the programme. The media do this constantly. Remember that Samantha Brick woman who whipped up a storm last year by writing a column in the Mail about how all other women hated her because she was beautiful? She was a troll, and the Mail's website benefited from all the increased banner ad viewings. This is just the same: making controversy for the sake of pageviews, advert clickthroughs and logo placement. The watercooler effect.

@VoodooV

I'm getting the impression people are getting a little overly bent out of shape about the Xbox One's convergence features.

Spec-wise it's all but identical to the PS4 so no apparent compromise has been made on performance. Hardware similarity will also all but guarantee easy ports. If anything I reckon this gen will be the closest we get to platform neutrality because of this.

For all its focus on non-game features MS must know that games sell consoles. They would be foolish in divesting away from first party titles or exclusives. If they get more purchases via spruiking their TV integration that will put them in a better position to pay for these.

Force bundling Kinect will surely inflate the price but it remains to be seen by how much. If they price themselves outside the PS4's range and people feel like it's an unnecessary accessory they won't use then it will hurt them obviously. Having said that, it's functionality actually looks genuinely interesting (and powerful) unlike their first Kinect beta test.

At least for me what's always turned me off Xbox and eventually convinced me to get a PS3 is the paid multiplayer. Coming from a PC I reckon it's flat out outrageous to charge people for what is effectively P2P quality multiplayer, let alone to them smother the hub with advertising. This will obviously not change for the One so I have no intention of giving them my money.

I reckon they'd be a pain because unless you get them perfectly aligned you won't be able to tell if they are done up fully or if they snagged part way.

I really hate that they bring in (mostly) unrelated crap like abortion statistics, but the core of their argument here is correct.

Yes, correct, in my opinion.

I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately, and if you are rejecting what they say about female breadwinners out of hand, you are not thinking deeply on the subject.

Certainly, every woman should have the right to do with her life as she pleases. Whether that is career, family, or some combination of the two. But I think in the coming years there will be more and more people realizing that the average woman can NOT have it all. While there will be a few exceptions, most women will not be good mothers to their children while working 40+ hours per week, and ANYBODY who doesn't give 110% to their career will not reach the highest levels of that career.

Women need to be taught young that they need to make a choice and prioritize. If you look at young girls, you will see them fantasizing from a very young age about being a mother. You will see women of all ages fantasizing about marriage. And you will see feminists telling them that they are wrong for doing that. You will see society pushing and pushing and pushing for women to choose career over family while giving nothing but lip service to the importance of family. And if you look at the statistics, you will see this is beginning to have an effect on society. More women are postponing starting a family, and some are even working through the height of their childbearing years to the point where they can no longer find a suitable mate to have children with at all.

And if they do have children, the women are not at home to raise them. Sure, they are home for the first few months to a year, then they're back to work and the children are being raised by strangers. Mom comes home in the evening and asks how everybody's day was, exactly the way dad does (assuming dad is still in the family core).

This is not a popular sentiment yet, but I believe that gender roles existed for a reason. Just looking at male and female biology, it is plain to see that (in general) men are equipped for the tasks that require strength, and women are equipped to raise children. And for most of recorded history, gender roles followed biology. I believe we are beginning to see a reckoning. It won't happen in every relationship. And of course I think we should be very careful about judging others. I think you should take this information and apply it to your own life. What kind of a family do you want? Do you want to have two working parents and kids in day care, or do you want one parent to stay home? Are you going to feel more satisfied staying home with the kids, or leaving every day to earn a paycheck? These are questions that nobody can answer but you. I think that absent a serious internal drive, women should gravitate to careers that will give the maximum flexibility so that they can spend all the needed time with their children. I think that we should be teaching our children that they can do anything, but there are certain traditional roles that tend to bring people the greatest amount of life satisfaction. And I think we need to keep doing research and watching the statistics to verify or debunk everything I have just said, because I am fully aware that it is mostly speculation and gut instinct on my part.

We are already slaves to nature, mate-The best case scenario has us shaking fists at the sky or ground-Slavery to someone's system that is opposed to our species' rhythm and biology...or our genetic code is when the shit gets scary-Slavery isn't as overt any longer, people reckon themselves too smart for that sort of thing-I distrust any world system without the evolution of the entire world's population in mind, and we ain't even close to that yet-We're still slaves to an ignorant path and the machine that keeps it going strong.

Not really aimpoint-A news source is nothing but a mouthpiece for agenda, anyhow. If the Al Thanni empire had not created AJ there would ONLY be the major mouthpieces playing for ratings.
Any real power resides in the propaganda created to convince the masses that following you instead of killing you is the best idea going....

Broadcast media has been shit for decades, I reckon the institution as a late-stage terminal suffering aggressive bone cancer. Maybe I'm not the best peep to discuss media with-

Better yet, the artist shouldn't have known which woman was being described.

And I reckon the results would be reversed for men.

Overweight, Nah, I'm just solid.
Grey haired? Distinguished looking.
Short? Stocky.
Wears glasses? intellectual.

Frankly, the whole thing reminded me of this

^ You can make all of that make sense by simply shifting your epistemological position to the only ones which truly make sense i.e. phenomenology &/or perspectivism.

To rephrase that in less impenetrable terms:
"Materialism" (or in your case I assume "Scientific Materialism") that is to say 'matter is primary', from a philosophers POV is a deeply flawed assumption. Flawed because there appears to be not one experience in human history that did not occur entirely within the mind.
When one see's say a Dog, one only ever experiences the images and sensations occurring within ones mind. You don't see the photons hitting your retina, only the way your mind as interpreted the data.

However the opposite position "Idealism" (mind is primary) is also fundamentally flawed in the exact opposite way. If our minds are the only "real" things then where exactly are they? And how do we even derive logic and reason if there is not something outside of ourselves which it describes? etc. etc.

Philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre' got around this by defining a new category, "phenomena". We know for certain that "phenomena" exist in some sense because we experience them, the categories of mind and matter then become secondary properties, both only existing as definitions we apply retrospectively to experiences. i.e. stuff happens and then our brains kick in and say "that happened because of X because in the past X has preceded similar experiences" or "that thing looks like other examples of Y so is probably Y".

The problem then is that this appears to come no closer to telling us what is objectively happening in the universe, it's more like linguistic/logical housekeeping. The phenomenologists and existentialists did a superb job of clearing away all of the old invalid baggage about how we try to describe things, but they did little or nothing to solve the problem of Kants "nouminal world" (i.e. the "real" stuff that we are experiencing by simulation in our minds).

Its stumped philosophers for centuries as we don't appear to have any way to ever get at this "nouminal" or "real" world we naturally assume must exist in some way. But....

I reckon ultimately one of the first western philosophers in history nailed the way out 3000 or so years ago. Pythagoras said "all is number" and due to the work of Euler, Riemann and Fourier in particular I think we can now make it stick. (yeh its turning into an essay sorry )

Without wishing to go deep into a subject you could spend half your life on; Fourier transforms are involved in signal processing. It is a mathematical means by which spatio-temporal signals (e.g. the vibration of a string or the movement of a record needle) can be converted with no meaningful loss of information into frequency (analog) or binary (digital) forms and back again.

Mathematically speaking there is no reason to regard the "signal" as any less "real" whether it is in frequency form or spatio-temporal form. It is the same "signal", it can be converted 100% either direction.

So then here's the biggie: Is there any reason why we could not regard instrumental mathematical numbers and operations (i.e. the stuff we write down and practice as "mathematics") and the phenomena in the universe they appear to describe. I.e. when we use man made mathematical equations to describe and model the behavior of "phenomena" we experience like say Physicists do, could we suggest that we are using a form of Fourier transform? And moreover that this indicates an Ontological (existing objectively outside of yourself) aspect to the mathematical "signals".

Or to put it another way, is mathematics itself really real?

The Reimann sphere and Eulers formula provide a mathematical basis to describe the entirety of known existence in purely mathematical terms, but they indicate that pure ontological mathematics itself is more primary than anything we ever experience. It suggests infact that we ourselves are ultimately reducible to Ontological mathematical phenomena (what Leibniz called "Monads").

What we think of as "reality" could then perhaps be regarded as non dimensional (enfolded) mathematics interacting in such a way as to create the experience of a dimensional (unfolded) universe of extension (such as ours).

(R = distance between two points)
Enfolded universe: R=0
Unfolded universe: R>0

Neither is more "real", they are simply different perspectives from which Ontological mathematics can observe itself.

"Reality": R>=0

I've explained parts of that poorly sorry. Its an immense subject and can be tackedled from many different (often completely incompatible) paradigms. I hope at the very lest I have perhaps demonstrated that the Holographic universe theory could have legs if we combine the advances of scientific exploration (i.e. study of matter) with those of Philosophy and neuroscience (i.e. study of mind & reason itself). The latest big theory doing the rounds with neuroscience is that the mind/consciousness is a fractal phenomenon, which plays into what I've been discussing here more than you might think.

Then again maybe you just wrote me off as a crackpot within the first few lines "lawl" etc..

I really liked this Petite Noir live show from fd in Dijon, but don't think it would sift. I reckon there's a good chance you'll like it though:



The songs are Till we ghosts and Disappear.

Might be worth pointing out that of those 784,000 abortions in 2009, 91% were at or before 13 weeks gestation. 64% were at or before 8 weeks, you know, when its about the size of your thumbnail. MURDER! There were 12 (legal) abortion related deaths in 2008. Not bad considering the WHO reckons that 68,000 women die a year around the world due to unsafe abortions.

Even if we accept the premise that all abortions should be counted as deaths then they still had to estimate a pretty large number of unreported/unsafe abortions to arrive at that 39%. I couldn't find an estimate for illegal abortions and I'm not sure it matters. If there really are another 750,000ish abortions going unreported, probably illegally and probably not safe then it seems to only emphasise the need for woman to have better access to safe, legal abortions.

And yes, avoid the philosophy because we can/have debated that until we are/were blue. The easy argument is that making abortion illegal has no impact on the number of abortions, it simply results in the suffering of women. The people who seem to have a problem with this are grey impaired and honestly are far too entrenched in their little world of absolutes to waste breath on.