Well, look at it this way : if you realize that "grades determine your life" is a little far-fetched while she beats herself up over an almost perfect score then maybe you' re the wisest one. Besides, her crying over this to you despite your much lower grades should tell you she' s not exactly the brightest bulb in the box either. ^^ The problem with school is that it tends to teach things in a certain way, but the best approach to teach to A might be the worst approach to teach to B. It' s hard to tell whether your grades are lower because you' re dumber, or simply because you think differently. Did you know that the DNA molecule model was not discovered by a scientist ? It was discovered by someone who was playing with molecular models as if they were legos. Some scientists told him which atoms were supposed to be there and in which proportion, and he went with that until one of them, seeing his double helix, exclaimed that was it ! The moral of that story is that ideas and thought process diversity is as vital to our survival as gene diversity. There is no such thing as better, only difference, for more on that (and a damn entertaining read to boot) you could read Empire of the ants. If I was you I would worry more about my self-depreciation issues than about my grades, I think that' s the real issue here.
Well, I' m not sure what definition for Religion you had in mind, but religious views definitely qualify as opinions. I posted a link about morality in animals in another thread. It mentions something very interesting : when you look at a landscape you don' t hold a ten minutes internal debate to decide whether it' s pretty or not, your verdict is pretty much instantaneous. A hospitable valley filled with rivers and trees will probably feel prettier than a desolate moon landscape to most people, because our brains are trained to equate hospitable with good. Morality works the same way. When you feel discomfort at, say, the thought of homosexuality, that discomfort is instantaneous and unreasoned, it' s pretty much a chemical reaction. One can try and use reason and evidence to contrast his first instinctive reaction and reach a better conclusion on the matter, but unfortunately we often tend to lazily pick the arguments that fit our initial emotional response rather than those that make the more sense (we usually do it unconsciously, see cognitive dissonance). That' s why Christians are able to cherry-pick which Bible laws are good and which aren' t : the Bible was never the source of their morality, nature and nurture were. Somebody mentioned parental and religious upbringing earlier in this thread, well that would be two of the many faces nurture can take. That being said, when I see someone post in this thread only to say "I' m against homosexual marriage because the Bible says so" it does slightly bug me. Not because it' s a religious opinion, freedom of thought and speech yady yady yada, nor because they cherry-picked the Bible, it bugs me because it' s a non-answer. The reason kids should not accept candies from strangers is that it could get them raped or worse, not that their mother told them so. I don' t really care whether the Bible condemns homosexuality or not, I' m much more interested in why one happens to agree with the Bible (or rather with his view of what the Bible says). This is the debate corner, not the here' s my two cents corner. Alternatively if they could explain which reasoning the Bible (or whichever religious source) provides to back up its conclusion then that would be interesting too, although to my knowledge the Bible barely bothers with the why (or needs you to believe in a few supernatural stuff on faith to validate the why, which is fallacious so it doesn' t exactly shine in a debate).
Technically girls are the majority group. It' s considered a hate crime if the accused displayed obvious hate for a category of people, whether that group is the majority or minority group is irrelevant. I' m not sure there are lots of cases of hate crimes against caucasians in court, if any, but technically it is possible. Not that it really matters though, I don' t know how things are in your country but in mine I don' t think whether it is a hate crime or not affects the sentence. Besides, despite the existence of dictionaries you can' t expect every people to label each information the same way. It seems that more and more people try and brandish a right to not feel offended, ever, which is quite incompatible with freedom of speech. There have been cartoons published in a French journal recently, cartoons about a US you-tube video that also made a fuss. I can' t post those cartoons nor the video on a PG 13 site (oh, sweet irony ^^), but here' s an article about it : http://gawker.com/5942748/it-makes-...e-was-deceived-had-no-idea-it-was-about-islam People have been murdered over this video. I honestly don' t see what the problem is with it. If you don' t like it then also exert your right to free speech and say so, but that' s it. This other video didn' t raise a single **** in my country, so why would a slur at the Koran be treated any differently ? Spoiler I think this picture sums it all up pretty nicely : Spoiler
I think they both come from the original game : the first one is the in-game model, the second one is the cutscene model. I' m not sure those weren' t tweaked, but I definitely noticed she had two different models in the original game. In X-2 they purposefully used the in-game Yuna model in cutscenes, for fake-Leblank Yuna : Spoiler
What you described has a name : cognitive dissonance. Give your friend a home-made cookie, one with a ginormously obvious cockroach in the middle. Tell him if he turns his brain off he won' t mind the bug and enjoy the cookie to its fullest. I bet he wouldn' t eat it but who knows, maybe he' ll find a way to dissone his cognition out of that one ... ^^
Humans, or rather social animals in general, indeed tend to apply favoritism when someone from their close circle is involved if that' s where you were going with this, but some people try to be impartial. Besides, it might come as a surprise to you but just because someone is family doesn' t mean (s)he' s necessarily part of your close circle. As for what happened here, from what few informations we got there (bordering none), I' d wager she had a pen and he had a sword. Crime passionnel, oldest story in the world. On a side note I' m quite curious about this Baha' i Faith Community, never heard of it before.
I never cross a street before making damn sure it' s safe to do so. I know the law is on my side, but it won' t do me any good if I wind up dead, or worse. There' s a street cross with no traffic lights right up my street, at least two people died here for crossing without looking. Somehow I think that particular law has both unforeseen and unfortunate consequences.
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I thought comfort food meant too rich/too much food, wikipedia says I' m wrong. I learned something today, yay !
Forever in your butt ? Unless you' re one of those lucky bastards who can eat whatever the hell they want without getting fat, like me.
Who doesn' t ?
FF VII. A friend of mine who imported FF VI told me it was awesome, and the FF VII trailers and whatnot looked amazing. I had already played other Squaresoft games years before that though : FF Legend 2 (weird US name choice, it' s actually SaGa 2) and two other games that definitely put Square on my radar : Seiken Densetsu 1&2 (Mystic Quest and Secret Of Mana in Europe, FF Adventure and Secret Of Mana in the US).
The Salvador Dali museum in Figueres is the only museum that didn' t bore me for a second. First, because Dali had quite a playful approach to painting, second because the museum kept true to that spirit and tried to make visitors interact with the oeuvres in many ways, sometimes in completely unexpected ways, which is immensely more intriguing than watching pictures passively, keeping your hands stucked in your pockets. I mean, look at the freaking museum, just from the look of it you can tell it' s definitely peculiar : Spoiler On a side-note I was raised in Perpignan, its train station ceiling was designed by Dali. Apparently he thought that particular train station was, I quote, "the center of the universe", which shows how far gone the man was. ^^ Spoiler
Patricia. No, my name isn' t Patrick. :3
I' m 32, ditto. When I see people concerned about being too old for this or that, desperately trying to avoid things that might make them look inappropriately childish, to me it just shows how immature they actually still are.
Well, if you want to know if good and evil exist you' d better define them first. I don' t agree with the catholic moral views I was taught, not just the rules themselves but also the metaphors drawn on morality origins and its definition, I disagree with the whole package. However I do believe there is such a thing as morality, good and bad. I just have a more practical approach : when you' re in kindergarten if you start punching the other kids to have their toys you' ll quickly notice no one wants to play with you anymore. Sooner or later from such experiences you draw the conclusion that you might want to refrain doing to others want you wouldn' t want them to do to you. Unfortunately things are rarely clear cut, the big problem is that grey area you mentioned. For instance take abortion (it' s just to illustrate, I don' t want to derail the thread with this) : at the beginning of the pregnancy the baby is just a bunch of cells, at the end of the pregnancy it' s a human being. From that we can gather that there is a line crossed somewhere in-between those two, the 20000 dollars question is, where exactly ? That' s the thing with morality, it' s easy to see where lines need to be drawn, but it' s much harder to decide where to draw it exactly. Morality invites debates, which I guess is one of the reasons that drove our ancestors to long for democracy. It' s a construct of every social animal mind, not just humans. The need for morality naturally arises from the need to live in society. If we lived alone, for our own sake, we wouldn' t need one. http://www.askwhy.co.uk/truth/b30animalmorals.php If you ignore that obnoxious "truth" title (certitude is a red herring in science) it' s a good read. I already posted it here once but maybe you skipped it.
Hey ! I' ll have you told that we can relax the crap out of you ! >:/ Seriously though, whatever it is you' re going to do, break a leg.
Crimson Azoth and Misty are right, keeping your hard drive almost full isn' t recommended when you use memory-hungry programs. However even once it' s cleaned up don' t expect the slowdowns to stop. Here' s something I was told in IT lessons (which was ten years ago so it may be obsolete by now *shrugs*) : Windows says he' s multi-task, but he really isn' t. It would imply that it can process A and B at the same time, but what they mean when they say that Windows is multi-task is that it can do a little bit of A, then jump forth to B, then get back to A etc ... Of course the result is that Windows needs more time to process A and B "at the same time" (lol) than separately. Video processing programs are very demanding, it' s no surprise they slow your computer down. Press Ctrl + Alt + Del when they are running and click on the performances tab, it should show you how much of your RAM and processing power is being used. Also, still in the Ctrl + Alt + Del tab, you can click on Process and see a list of all the programs that are running. If there' s your user name next to a process it means that process isn' t windows-related, you can right click on any of those process and terminate them to free up some RAM (for instance do you really need Divx Auto Update to be running right now ?). You can also right-clik on the Windows Movie Maker process and change its priority. Remember the A+B explanation ? The priority of a process is the proportion of time Windows will spend on it before it jumps back to another process : if you get the priority down it will prevent your computer from slowing down but processing the video will take more time, if you get the priority up your computer will slow down even more but it will process the video faster. In other words maybe you should get Windows Movie Maker' s priority down when you need to use the computer at the same time, and get its priority up before you leave or go to sleep.
Wait, you mean nobody pointed that out ? But then of course if (s)he' s stupid enough not to realize it on his/her own then (s)he' s probably stupid enough to not care.
