onoway

Seems to me that health care around the world would improve dramatically AND go down in cost if doctors were paid when their patients got better instead of no matter what happens. Has to be one of the few businesses (veterinarians are another) when what the people you are paying actually accomplish is totally irrelevant to their financial success. Can you imagine paying someone to fix a leaky roof and it got worse instead of better but you still had to pay the full amount that you would have paid if he had actually fixed it? Supposedly paying only when a successful outcome was once the practice in China and possibly elsewhere but tended to be accompanied with people literally losing their heads if they lost an "important" patient which is admittedly a tad drastic. Somewhere, though, there ought to be some sort of difference between a good outcome and a bad one. It might also make people look a little harder at some of the drugs and their side effects being peddled to a naive public. Now it sometimes seems as though at least some of them deal with one issue but cause another. Good for business, not so much for people.

well opinions are wonderful things.:) One of my favorite pieces of music is Miserere with Bocelli and Zucchero, much much prefer it to the versions with Pavarotti. http://www.metacafe.com/watch/yt-c_KVsJLFxz0/andrea_bocelli_zucchero_miserere/ I find his blindness distracting though, prefer to listen only, but then that's usually the case anyway. The first opera I ever saw was so very badly acted it totally spoiled the music. Sarah Brightman I find unwatchable, though to listen is fine.

ok I posted on that thread.. still have no idea why it closed with only one player missing though.

May I suggest a compromise? I was hosting and not playing so BBO may have decided that 2 people had left although only one had. Unless it is the host who has withdrawn ( and how does this work if the host isn't playing in the first place?) then a GIB go in until a sub is found. A lot of people prefer to play with humans, so being able to replace the bots with humans would be a good thing. If a GIB could pop in after a minute, say when the second notice of a player missing used to happen, and then be replaced when a new player was found that should take care of the situation? Would that be difficult to do? Otherwise, I'd prefer it either to allow for more withdrawals, or at the very least allow more time to find a sub. Please.

Nobody told me they were leaving, they just left. My notification via BBO was that I had one person missing. Only one person was missing, as far as I know. I had told them I was going to get a sub, and after the match had been cancelled I was trying to find out the nick of the person who had left...nobody said anything about two people leaving. They were certainly all there (well 7 of them were) when I left to get a sub, but admittedly half the time nobody actually pays any attention to what you tell them :) No no subbing the boards were entirely blank, only showed the names of the people who had been sitting there, no cards, no scores, no =, no anything. I tried switching tables,leaving the tables and coming back, coming in with a different ID, and it made no difference at all. After the third hand everything was as usual.

Two things...sorry Ben. 1> someone left and before I could sub him BBO cancelled the match. It takes a little time to move from the teams area to IAC and call for subs, but I only got one warning. Is this standard now? I've never had BBO cancel a match before. Is there any way to prevent it from happening again? 2) One match the first two boards did not register on either table, and one table the first three boards didn't register, they were completely blank in the movie as well, just as though they had not been played. That seemed very odd, but luckilly the score was sufficiently lopsided at the end that nobody complained, and the players didn't see at the time since the barometer wasn't enabled. Still, two hands could make a huge difference, especially since some of the swings were dramatic. Suggestions? I messaged UDay at the time but had no reply. At least one of the three matches went off without anything weird happening.

Does seem a little odd that this "natural" phenomenon is just now showing up. Australia was also one of the first to approve the use of "meat glue" that is used to glue meat scraps together to make filets and roasts etc. indistinguishable from the real thing. Technology is a wonderful thing.

Went back three pages looking for the old thread and then just decided to start a new one...thought this was fun http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX3af3xZSWY

maybe in the wrong thread and it will only manage to annoy everyone but it made me laugh when I ran across it today Oscar Wilde: I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

everything

Maybe it's easier to spy on friends than it is to spy on enemies. Also, governments never know when it's going to be advantageous to change an enemy to a friend, and vice versa, so they want to be ready, maybe? or maybe it's like so much else with computers, just because they can.

The link was just a quick reference for background for people who may not wish to read abstracts for what is after all a simple thing for anyone to look up. You must have a very empty life if you have to look that hard for things to quibble about. It must also be comforting to know that all is right with the world and there's absolutely nothing to be concerned about in any area whatsoever.

I think everything we do and think is shaped by what we believe. People who believe in science think that makes everything make more sense; other people disagree. Sometimes belief is shaped by religion but society cannot be ignored in the role it also plays to enforce the belief that life is better if you behave "ethically" according to the particular culture the person happens to be living in. Some people believe that their lives will be better if they treat people well..i.e as they (presumably) would like to be treated. Other people don't have that belief and then they might have the belief that they can knock over the convenience store and the positive possible results are worth more than the possible negative results. Maybe they even believe there won't be any negative consequences for them. I once knew a young man who firmly believed he was smarter than the police. The fact that they kept catching him and he was spending most of his life in jail didn't manage to shake his convictions. Other people believe that the negative possible results are not worth the possible positive consequences for them. They may have no concern about other people at all, they simply don't want the discomfort of what they believe MIGHT happen if they behave too antisocially. Now, what we "believe" is more and more decided by Madison Avenue types who have managed to instill what to me are curious convictions, such as being the first to buy a new Apple product brings prestige, or someone with a nice body and face is the person to be admired and emulated. It's pretty much agreed that politicians have to have the skills to manage social media to get elected, and none of it has anything to do with anything of substance. That's my belief anyway :)

http://www.monsanto.com/features/Pages/monsanto-acquires-the-climate-corporation.aspx Now Monsanto is getting truly frightening, imo. We have had people fiddling with the weather for decades;seeding the clouds to make it rain has likely been done for over half a century. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=98859&page=1 Ever since 'climate change" ideas hit the big time all sorts of exotic and weird ideas (orbiting mirrors?) have been proposed to make the weather do what we want. Some people believe some of these things are already being tried, I can't find reliable data about that. However, when you get what is basically a chemical and bioengineering company with a long track record of believing that long term effects are of no interest or concern and a firm conviction that it can do a better job of arranging things than systems several million years in the making, as well as numerous convictions for disregarding laws regarding what is and is not allowed ...there is imo no reason at all to assume that Monsanto will soon..overtly or not..be involved with trying to control the weather.

Quite amazing. First you insist that this must be about using oil from behind McDonalds, which had absolutely nothing to do with what I was saying. Now that has been pointed out, somehow you manage to reduce talking about all garbage to talking about chicken farms - which as far as I know were never even mentioned - and totally ignore the fact that METHANE - WHICH IS PRODUCED BY GARBAGE- organic waste - is far far more damaging than the "carbon emissions". Organic waste is being produced in massive amounts every day everywhere. Organic waste produces methane, (and compost) and we are paying people lots of money to put it in landfills or haul it out to sea or through sewage systems rather than use it. Maybe that makes sense to you but to me it's like running the furnace with the outside door wide open. That was the point of my original post on this aspect of climate change, and it most certainly IS on topic. Then you pontificate that a process which is presently being successfully used all over the world in and out of cities and which you clearly have absolutely no clue about and no interest in learning about either "won't work" Of course if you choose to focus on things which were neither said nor suggested and argue with them it seems a little like - well - let's say you clearly don't need anyone else involved for your own gratification. so, enjoy yourself.

You also managed to miss the point. You do know that electricity loses a good deal of its capacity to do work over distance, right? So at a minimum, if you have hydro being produced relatively locally by from waste produced locally, that alone cuts back on the amount of electricity that needs to be produced because it doesn't have to be pushed through lines for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles. That says nothing of the infrastructure which now needs all sorts of maintenance and fancy systems/gadgets to prevent one failure somewhere in the line from wiping out the power across a huge area, as happened a few years back when apparently something in a switching station failed and plunged most of the eastern US and a small area of Canada into darkness. That's two points. Another point is that finding places to PUT garbage is becoming more of an issue all the time, it's being towed out to sea and dumped..hardly an environmentally sensible thing to do with plastic gyres in both the Atlantic and Pacific ocean getting larger by the day and plastic contamination now found in every ocean in the world - and that's just the plastic. The other option generally involves trucking it long distances to someplace which has exchanged " not in MY back yard" to "well ok, but it's gonna cost you plenty." It is costing every community more every year to get rid of (hide somewhere) their garbage. It's a resource we are not only wasting but we are PAYING to waste it. We are paying trucks to haul it away, often hundreds of miles and then paying more to dump and bury it. This seems to be stupid, when instead we could avoid all of that and have the waste be producing electricity..or even simply use the methane as we now use natural gas, and have another usable product at the end which could be an excellent medium for growing food. No pollution and two high quality usable products. It would also preempt a lot of need for such things as fracking and poisoning the environment with things like the tar sands; not entirely, but to a large extent. Perhaps that alone is why we don't - we might annoy the big oil companies and cut into their profits. If people are convinced that the processor must be the size of Mount Everest and nothing smaller deserves consideration under any circumstances then there's no point in trying to discuss anything which might suggest a variety of sizes to be appropriate, depending on location. I guess they eat only ostrich eggs. It doesn't matter if they have to come from a lot further away, cost more to produce, lead to waste because many people couldn't eat a whole one, they're bigger so must be better seems to be the conviction of the day.

First of all: The data about the US you referred to was not talking about running 25 000 cars on used oil from 25 000 McDonalds, they are talking about providing the energy needs for 25,000 HOUSES from 162 farms. It's an entirely different system or process than making biodiesel from used oil. It would be nice if people made SOME effort to understand what was being said - or even read the data provided!! - before they attacked it. Sheesh. It's difficult to exceed the capacity of a resource consumers are renewing every day at a level that we cannot keep up with even when we just dump it in landfills or tow it out to sea to dump it there, not even taking into account sewage. You seem to be fixated on McDonalds and used oil, is it within your capacity to understand METHANE production...not biodiesel.. applies to all organic waste from the contents of dirty diapers to mouldy lettuce, including but not limited to, used cooking oil? Cooking oil might be better used to make biodiesel, I've no idea and it is not part of what I was proposing. Methane production from waste is being commonly done in Europe, India, China, other parts of Asia, South Africa, Australia,obviously to a limited degree in the States, probably in every country in the world now, some large and some small scale. Don't let the facts that it is scalable and IS WORKING in places around the world disturb your uninformed confidence that it won't work.

http://www.c2es.org/technology/factsheet/anaerobic-digesters quick facts: this does not constitute scalability? (The bold lettering was mine, to focus on the pertinent points)

I get "Navigation to web page was cancelled". I tried switching it to E and then the news page didn't come up at all. I switched it back to C and again get Navigation to web page was cancelled. Says I can try to refresh the page but I don't see anywhere on the thing that there's anywhere to do that. The other night I got the same message when I'd just finished a team match and it didn't show the results. It didn't matter as we knew what they were and the movie recap was there anyway but it's all quite odd. I did try to get the page several times, just to see; the third time it came up as usual. I am one of the download holdouts and wondered if that was the reason, but it seems that's not the case with the news at least. The other may be my computer's fault,since it did eventually come up.

sorry but I think this is an absurd, self congratulatory and totally unwarranted comment. Silence happens when it is clear that nobody is listening to any other pov so there isn't any point in continuing to be involved. What point is there is continuing to talk about something when it's going to achieve absolutely nothing? You think fundamentalists are going to listen to moderates any more than they are to anyone else not as fundamentalist as themselves? Seems better to use the energy to talk about something (or even better, try to do something, (and that something likely has nothing whatever to do with religion) that there is a possibility to achieving something productive out of it. I think that people with closed minds on either side of the religious debate simply firm up the other side in their convictions. Neither really brings anything particularly interesting to the discussion because neither can tolerate anything which brings any part of their beliefs (on either end of the religious spectrum) into question, so why bother?

oh? here, waste is managed by government regulation, including the recurring search for dumps for garbage. Hydro is a government owned/run business and so is natural gas. How is it inappropriate to expect the tax dollars to be used more efficiently? Futile, perhaps, but why inappropriate?

I keep wondering when governments will start using the mountains of waste, sewage and other organic waste, to produce methane. A pig farmer in the States ran his entire operation, including fuel for his vehicles, from the methane produced by the pigs back in the early 1940s. In the 1960's Harold Bates was running his vehicle around on the production of a little chicken and pig manure. http://www.nfb.ca/film/bates_car_sweet_as_a_nut/ His adapter is no longer available. Presently, it is possible in India to buy even residential size digesters to process kitchen waste for cooking gas. In the meantime governments look for ever more places to dump garbage.

another quote from the internet.. Albert Einstein is sometimes claimed by religious theists seeking the authority of a famous scientist for their theistic views, but Einstein denied the existence of the traditional concept of a personal god. Was Albert Einstein therefore an atheist? From some perspectives his position would be seen as atheism or no different from atheism. He admitted to being a freethinker, which in a German context is much the same as atheism, but it's not clear that Einstein disbelieved in all god concepts. 1. Albert Einstein: From a Jesuit Viewpoint, I am an Atheist I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. - Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a Jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism; quoted by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic, Vol. 5, No. 2 ~~~ ~~~ ~~ Guess I'll take his word for it. Note he didn't say heathen, he said atheist.

You may indeed have done a lot of reading but it seems none of it included what I actually said.