My father mentioned being slightly worried about not having his bug-out bag in order today, so yeah.
GoodGuyGreg
JoinedPosts by GoodGuyGreg
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19
Will the jw's get all excited about Russia in the Ukraine?
by hoser inusually when world events like this take place the dubs start into how the end must be so close they can almost taste it.
maybe there will be some speculation about the king of the north and south again.
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Use cell phones sparingly!
by abiather ina friendly message with regard to the use of cell phones.. we have all the reasons to minimise its use, and try to put it on speakerphone whenever possible keeping it away from your head and body.. .
iphones particularly should not be carried on the body.. .
watch this news report http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ld8pcsjnca.
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GoodGuyGreg
While I agree that cell phones should be used sensibly, there's very little evidence for harmful health effects caused by their radio transmitters. Simply taking the time to understand the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, along with the methods of signal strength and -absorbtion measurement ought to help bring some sense into the discussion.
@L3G: The Swedish researcher who keeps getting his results questioned isn't "dissed" by the scientific community because he's telling uncomfortable truths, but because his methods are scientifically questionable. Please don't just repeat conspiracy theories without taking the time to actually apply some critical thinking to them.
@zeb: The last sentence applies to you too. "2 gigs of power" doesn't make any sense at all. What you're probably trying to say is that phones and microwave ovens both work in the 2 GHz spectrum, which is only true for very loose definitions of the 2 GHz spectrum (your definition would need to encompass a band from a few hundred MHz to about 5 GHz). The important difference, though, is that a microwave oven might be converting some 1000 W into radiation and heat, while a cell phone works with closer to 2 W.
I'm on my tablet right now, so editing isn't very easy, but please google "conspiracy theory detector" and read the excellent Scientific American article by Michael Shermer.
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70
Mac Book Pro with Retina or Dell XPS 15? (both with new Haswell processors)
by Simon ini've been in need of a new laptop for a long time.
no, i mean it - a really long time.
the old dell that we have has a floppy lid and is woefully underpowered although it does build up my upper body strength every time i pick it up.. the last 6 months has been a bad time to buy something new though with the haswell processors on the horizon promising better battery life and also screen technology seems to have been leaping ahead recently to a new hi-dpi standard.. so apple finally released their mac book pro and at the same time dell has released an xps 15 ultrabook which looks like a pretty good alternative and probably better 'value'.. pro's and con's?
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GoodGuyGreg
+1 on going Apple, especially since you know your way around computers. If you check out the prices of similarly specced machines from different companies, you'll see that the so-called apple tax doesn't really exist, in the beginning of a production cycle. Add to that the robustness of a Unix based operating system and the design choices aimed at minimizing bloat and providing a snappy user experience during year after year of ownership, and the choice really is a no-brainer.
My current mid-2010 MBP will be bought out and used at home when I get a new one at work (an upcoming project will require me to run several virtual Windows servers in tandem while on the move, which might be a tad too much for a dual core i5 with 8GB of RAM). It has been up and down my backpack for three and a half years and I really see no serious signs of aging on it, nor has it lost any of its initial speed (granted, the first thing I did was to install an SSD in place of the original 5400 rpm disk). The old T- and W-series Thinkpads I used to use would have if not broken then at least seriously loose lid hinges by that time, and I would usually reinstall them at least once every 9 to 12 months to regain some speed in Windows. On the Mac I just reboot every once in a while and run Onyx every couple of months to keep things shipshape.
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GoodGuyGreg
I used to use Thinkpad T-series computers at work, and they've had finger print readers since more than a decade. They might be a cool feature to show off, but they've got a bloated implementation on top of the regular Windows login prompt, because really: is it that hard to just type your password a few times per day on a regular keyboard?
I haven't used them for a long while (since many years, I remove all bloat from a new PC), so I'm unsure if they just replace the regular login prompt or if you can use the fingerprint reader for UAC (when installing software or drivers) too.
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Do you recall your first encounter with a atheist? What was your thought?
by jam ingrowing up in the south everyone i knew believed in god, even the.
town drunk.
i remember watching some special tv program around xmas .
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GoodGuyGreg
Having grown up in Scandinavia, meeting atheists wasn't really uncommon. I had some openly atheist teachers in school, mom used to try to start a study with a biologist, etc.
@OP: Since atheism usually is the result of getting more information rather than being some kind of moral statement, I'm less surprised if the town drunk wasn't one than that more prominent members of the community with a better education weren't.
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Is Richard Dawkins giving atheists a bad name?
by slimboyfat inhe just can't seem to stop himself taunting "these muslims" or "some muslim or other".
among his favourite taunts are:.
"all the world's muslims have fewer nobel prizes than trinity college, cambridge.".
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GoodGuyGreg
@Laika: How would you argue that people do good because of their religious beliefs? Are you saying that non-believers have no inclination to do good deeds? Or that if we took away religion, everybody would be evil? Of course people do good primarily because that's part of the human nature.
But the other side of the coin is that when people are part of a system where the system is considered more important than the individuals it consists of, horrible things will be done in the name of this system. If the system in addition has rules and regulations that add ingredients like enforced ignorance and xenophobia, then the system becomes truly dangerous. We here on this board were once part of such a system. Threads about the org's fear of higher education are regularly recurring, as are threads about people being told to not think critically (that is: analyze what they're being told) but instead have faith (a trust in their leaders which may but doesn't have to be founded in actual facts).
And this is what Dawkins doesn't like about Islam either: it's pretty telling that a religion that once was the driving force behind science while Europe was stuck in the dark ages, a religion consisting of about one quarter of our planet's human population, has produced two scientific Nobel laureates in the past 111 years. What happened to the need to understand the world? And how come such a system has turned from being a driving force behind science to becoming a force against science and the spreading of knowledge among the population in the countries where it's dominant? Something there is rotten, and it's not the human nature.
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"Whether These Appear Sound From a Strategic or Human Standpoint or Not." - What do YOU think?
by jw07 inhttp://www.jw.org/en/publications/magazines/w20131115/seven-shepherds-eight-dukes/.
paragraph 17.
"at that time, the life-saving direction that we receive from jehovahs organization may not appear practical from a human standpoint.
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GoodGuyGreg
I frankly think it's mostly a sign that the guy who wrote the article wants to show his superiors he's good enough for a promotion, and the formulation sounded good enough in their ears that they kept it.
I often had it repeated to me by my die-hard jw grandfather, that we should trust the organization as we trust our parents: if they tell us to do something or to avoid something without an explanation, we should trust that it's for our good. The only problem, is that my parents showed me time after time that a lot of what they required from me was completely arbitrary and had nothing to do with my own good. After a while I began noticing the same pattern in the congregation, and it became very obvious when I went on one of the information meetings for Bethel volunteers on a DC.
TL;DR: They probably didn't mean anything ominous, they're just really bad at finding new ways of saying "we've got this, trust us".
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Is Richard Dawkins giving atheists a bad name?
by slimboyfat inhe just can't seem to stop himself taunting "these muslims" or "some muslim or other".
among his favourite taunts are:.
"all the world's muslims have fewer nobel prizes than trinity college, cambridge.".
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GoodGuyGreg
@slimboyfat: Dawkins takes atheism a bit further than I'd be prepared to. And some of his more vocal criticisms aren't very well formulated if you want to make people see the problems with their current standpoint.
But having less-than-moderate views in some areas does not invalidate the areas where the guy is right. Also, he actually is pretty much right even in the areas where he's not very nice about it. It's just that it doesn't help his cause.
Otherwise, I agree with @Phizzy, that he's not a spokesperson that can be said to represent atheists as a group, since there is no real group to talk about. He's simply a pretty smart guy with enough of a platform to make himself heard and the wish to do so for what he views as the good of mankind. You don't have to agree with him, but without other arguments than that you don't like his attitude you won't prove him wrong.
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A Great rebuttal to the likes of Ray Comfort
by cantleave ini was going to add this to the common ancestry thread but it covers much more.
i love this woman....... http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=uuravycv6c0copl2ukvzhznw&v=i0k9nyhh7tq.
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GoodGuyGreg
Nice vid. Too bad it won't really help anyone not already on the fence.
@Slimboyfat: Pretty and smart is a pretty winning combination in my book.
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There are more Jehovah's Witnesses in Portugal than there are Scientologists in the whole world
by cedars init would be nice if this little nougat of information could be more widely known - especially by journalists.. the quoted figures for scientology are taken from tony ortega's 2011 article in the village voice, which quotes former scientology pr executive jeff hawkins as saying.... "i know that event attendance internationally was somewhere in the region of 25,000 to 35,000. the international 'bodies in the shop' (people actually in the orgs that week for service) was 16,000 to 18,000. ias was struggling to get 40,000 members.
based on this and a lot of other information i was privy to, i estimate the actual number of scientologists at a maximum of 40,000. that's on the high side.".
portugal is one of 33 countries with more than 40,000 active jehovah's witnesses - demonstrating the gulf in size between the two faiths.. the following list shows all countries with more than 40,000 jws according to their reported peak publishers for 2013.. .
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GoodGuyGreg
Cedars:
There's no way 4 out of 10 newly baptized ones were coming in from informal Witnessing when I was an active Jdub. It was more like 8 or 9 out of 10 were friends or (mostly) family, with an extra 1 or 2 out of 10 the product of "some form" of preaching activity.
This was exactly my point: If you talk to friends and relatives (not counting children), that usually falls in the informal service category (or at least I'd count it as such back when I was properly in, and I don't see why the org wouldn't). This plus the children who join, probably accounts for pretty much every new member in most of the world. The only question is whether friends and relatives are closer to 40% or closer to 60% of the people who join each year. I believe they might be right in it being closer to 40%.