Heheh yeah.



Well it seems like I have relatively good reason to trust the gaim/pidgin thing then seeing as it's much more realistic to me that no one would have blocked you and that ur old contacts removed you. It would be funny(and mean) if Trillian randomly flagged people as blocking to you just to make it look like it works!

Yeah but how do you know if it tells the truth? People would normally lie about whether they're blocking you anyway no?

I'm not sure what program he was using exactly but I have a friend who kept accusing me of blocking him on msn when I wasn't, claiming his program spoke the ultimate truth and quite frankly he was never actually blocked by me so I don't trust all those apps to be accurate.

Meh. Everything has a positive aspect. The 25 percent who said yes were probably just being realistic/honest.

I don't understand how they could have mistaken E for strawberry candies.

What's with the lollie language? Were they on a stick?

*sigh* You're so right. I really gotta start taking better care of my pussy before it gets all wrinkly and green. Last time I let that happen I was eating fungi soup for a whole two weeks. Too much of a good thing can make you sick but you know, it had to go somewhere. And it was all becuase of unmoistened tampons. Never trust the box instructions :(

Exactly, who cares?

You can sue people in Canada, it's just not as easy as in the states. My dad sued canadian tire. Also the best payed jobs are usually in human resources.

Hahahahhahaha! I love me.

Jesus christ you people are fucking pathetic.

*cough*Athlon*cough*sucks.

Since when did the record industry even use the word emo? I thought people hated them cause they called themselves or were called punk, casting a shadow over the real punk scene for people who don't know any better, while their music doesn't(but perhaps at some point did?) sound like it at all except for three chords and they don't care about politics or world affairs. I didn't realise they had ever actually called themselves Emo.

Yeah every office should have naked day. It's like denim day except instead of giving money to cancer research you give your clothes to african children. You also get to experience an authentic african workplace environment.

It stands for EMOtional.

They aren't giving their tricks away, they're just diverting attention from the tricks they're actually using on you right now by revealing other tricks to you in order to make you believe that they aren't using any on you right now. Oldest trick in the book.

Heheh you could be right and I may be paranoid but nothign will sell me to this. I'm sure there are more environmentally friendly soap companies than Dove, it's not going to make me buy their products. It will sell them a lot of products though, guaranteed.

Nothing new or different. Sure it's a positive message but it's meant to make you sympathise with the company and make you think they're the good guys which is the only reason they put any money or time into it. Besides even warning against their own evils isn't gonna change their ability to get across to young girls, if anything it'll probably just make them more recerptiove to dove's marketing because they're the 'good guys who care about little girl's self image.' I'm only surprised to see a thread about it.

No you don't have to validate your email or respond to anything. They do send you an email saying the same thing as the webpage, maybe they don't count you if your email is invalid, I unno. I have an email that I use just for spam and crap, that's what I gave them.

You can give a fake email.

Yeah it's useless but who cares.

I just got the weirdest phone call ever. I'm sitting at my desk at work, the phone rings, I say hello and a recording answers back : "As a good global citizen we ask you please to visit [ stopglobalwarming.org ] I don't understand how they could have even got my number. That was fucking weird but fucking cool. Anyways join the virtual march people. All you do is give your name and email, click submit and you're done.

"I signed up to join the Stop Global Warming Virtual March and I encourage you to add your voice as well. Global warming is the most urgent issue of our time and since we are all contributors to global warming pollution we must all be part of the solution. Joining the Virtual March is a first step to joining the movement to demand solutions now.

You can join by visiting: [ www.stopglobalwarming.org ]

[ StopGlobalWarming.org ] mission is to use the strength of numbers to urge our government to address global warming, and urge businesses to start a new industrial revolution of clean energy that reduces our dependence on oil and helps stop global warming.

Together we can make a difference."

Spam weapon helps preserve books
By Paul Rubens

A weapon used to fight spammers is now helping university researchers preserve old books and manuscripts.
Many websites use an automated test to tell computers and humans apart when signing up to an account or logging in.

The test consists of typing in a few random letters in an image and is designed to fight spammers.

Carnegie Mellon is using this test to help decipher words in books that machines cannot read by letting sites use them to authenticate log-ins.

The test, known as a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), was originally designed at Carnegie Mellon to help to keep out automated programs known as "bots."

Spam messages

Bots are designed by spammers to post advertisements in discussion forums or to sign up for large numbers of e-mail addresses which are later used to send spam messages.

A CAPTCHA consists of an image containing letters or numbers which have been heavily distorted, making it hard or impossible for a bot to "read."

By requiring web site visitors to type in the contents of the CAPTCHA before being allowed in to the site, humans can be admitted while all but the smartest bots are rebuffed.

CAPTCHAs are unpopular with many Internet users because the words they contain are often so heavily distorted to foil bots that that many humans struggle to read them.

This means potential visitors' time is wasted while they make repeated attempts to decipher the CAPTCHA they are presented with.

But the CMU research team, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has devised an ingenious system to put the time used interpreting CAPTCHAs to good use.

Text files

The team is involved in digitising old books and manuscripts supplied by a non-profit organisation called the Internet Archive, and uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to examine scanned images of texts and turn them into digital text files which can be stored and searched by computers.

But the OCR software is unable to read about one in 10 words, due to the poor quality of the original documents.

The only reliable way to decode them is for a human to examine them individually - a mammoth task since CMU processes thousands of pages of text every month.

To solve this problem the team takes images of the words which the OCR software can't read, and uses them as CAPTCHAs.

These CAPTCHAs, known as reCAPTCHAS, are then distributed to websites around the world to be used in place of conventional CAPTCHAs.

When visitors decipher the reCAPTCHAs to gain access to the web site, the answers - the results of humans examining the images - are sent back to CMU.

Every time an Internet user deciphers a reCAPTCHA, another word from an old book or manuscript is digitised.

Deciphered correctly

To ensure that the reCAPTCHAs are deciphered correctly, website visitors are actually presented with images of two words to examine, the contents of one of which is already known.

"If a person types the correct answer to the one we already know, we have confidence that they will give the correct answer to the other," says Luis von Ahn, a Professor at CMU.

"We send the same unknown words to two different people, and if they both provide the same answer then effectively we can be sure that it is correct.

If they don't agree then we send it to a lot more people to examine."

Thanks to the adoption of reCAPTCHAs by popular websites like Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon, the system is helping to decipher about one million words every day for CMU's book archiving project, according to von Ahn.

Given that it takes about 10 seconds to decipher a reCAPTCHA and type in the answer, this represents the equivalent of almost three thousand man hours a day spent deciphering words that CMU's computers find illegible.

A handy extra benefit of this system is that reCAPTCHAs are particularly good at foiling bots while remaining legible to people.

"Firstly, we are starting with words that we know our computers can't read," says von Ahn. "These words have also been distorted naturally over time, and the number of ways they have been distorted is very large.

'Distorted further'

"The more ways they are distorted, the harder it is for spammers to write software which can read them."

To make it even harder for bots, these words are then distorted further.

"What we do is the equivalent of placing the image on a rubber sheet and pulling it to distort the geometry," he says.

Using the reCAPTCHA system von Ahn's team is digitising documents and manuscripts as fast as the Internet Archive can supply them, and the good news for book lovers (and bad news for spammers) is that the supply of reCAPTCHAs is not likely to dry up any time soon.

"There's no danger of us running out of words," says von Ahn. "There's still about 100 million books to be digitised, which at the current rate will take us about 400 years to complete."

Israel admits air strike on Syria
[ news.bbc.co.uk ]

Israel has confirmed that it carried out a strike on a Syrian military installation last month.
Syria accused Israel at the time but Israeli officials refused to comment, and the Israeli military censor imposed a strict blackout on information.

The censor's office has now allowed some details to be released.

On Monday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the BBC that a Syrian military construction site was hit in the Israeli air strike on 6 September.

President Assad said the raid demonstrated Israel's "visceral antipathy towards peace" - and that Syria would retaliate.

Syria and Israel are formally at war. Israeli has occupied the Golan Heights since 1967. Peace talks between them collapsed in 2000.

Mystery remains

In the early hours of 6 September a number of Israeli jets appeared to enter Syrian airspace from the Mediterranean Sea.

Later, unidentified drop tanks, which may have contained fuel from the planes, were found on Turkish soil near the Syrian border, indicating a possible exit route.

Witnesses said the Israeli jets had been engaged by Syrian air defences in Tall al-Abyad, north of Raqqa and near the border with Turkey.

It is still not known why Israel carried out the strike or what exactly was hit.

On Tuesday, Israeli Army radio reported that Israeli planes had attacked a military target "deep inside Syria", quoting the military censor. No further details were given.

Some US officials have linked the raid to suspicions of secret nuclear co-operation between Damascus and North Korea, suggesting a fledgling research centre may have been the target.

Damascus and North Korea have denied any nuclear ties.

Other reports suggested that the raid may have targeted Iranian arms bound for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, or materials going in the other direction, to Iran.

Another theory is that it was simply an Israeli test of Syria's improving air defences.

Correspondents say there has been some suggestive leaking from Washington, but that the usual diplomatic sources have been uncharacteristically quiet over the incident.

Syria 'may retaliate'

The incident is still shrouded in mystery, says the BBC's world affairs correspondent, Nick Childs.

Was Israel just sending a message, he wonders, and if so, to whom?

And are others now exploiting the ambiguities in all this to peddle their own political agendas - for example, to unnerve Syria or Iran, or to discredit North Korea?

If nothing else, it is all a reminder of what a volatile mixture of interrelated tensions are present in the region, our correspondent says.

Syria's president told the BBC that Syria reserved the right to respond to the attack - but he did not say how.

"Retaliate doesn't mean missile for missile and bomb for bomb. We have our means to retaliate, maybe politically, maybe in other ways. But we have the right to retaliate," Mr Assad said.

Monks missing as bustle returns
Reporters in Burma's main city of Rangoon have been describing the atmosphere there following the military's suppression of anti-government protests.
Their identities are being withheld for security reasons.
[ news.bbc.co.uk ]

MONDAY
On Monday morning the city centre was almost back to normal, or as normal as things can be when there's a group of soldiers around every corner.

Most of the shops and temples are now open and people are trying to get on with their lives as best they can. But amid the noise and bustle of everyday life, there is one notable absence.

This city is normally full of monks, going in and out of temples, shopping on the street stalls, and even stopping for a chat in the teashops.

Windowless hall

This morning though we hardly saw any. That is because for the last few days the military has been busy rounding them up.

Thousands of monks have been arrested since the weekend and many of them are now locked up in the government technical college on the outskirts of the city - a windowless hall which has three military vehicles stationed outside.

Local people are well aware that the monks have been locked away, and they are afraid that they themselves could be next.

"I'm really scared," a woman told us quietly when she was sure no-one else could hear.

If the Burmese military wanted to silence the protesters through fear, they seem to have largely succeeded. But they know they cannot keep the monks locked up for ever, and people are waiting anxiously to see what happens next.



SUNDAY
The hundreds of military and riot police around the Sule Pagoda in downtown Rangoon were busy over the weekend, stopping young men, padding them down and making them kneel with their hands behind their backs.


Half of the shops were open but the shoppers were outnumbered by the security forces present, and all the internet cafes were closed.

People told me that they were too afraid to do anything with so many soldiers around.

They are scared, they say, because they had seen that they were prepared to shoot children, women and monks, so they felt helpless - but at the same time they assured me that the demonstrations would continue.

There are reports that the thousands of monks who were detained after their monasteries were ransacked are refusing to take food from the soldiers who are guarding them.

Church 'apolitical'

On Sunday morning, the churches held special services praying for peace and reconciliation for the country. I went to a Catholic church where a priest led a prayer for the victims of the military violence.

The church wants to remain apolitical.

The priests say that they will not call on the people to join the protests but at the same time they won't stop them either.

However, priests say they will provide moral guidance for those willing to join the demonstrations.

only male?

I know but that was uncalled for.

Ummm.. I've read way more books on the subject than you thank you very much. You have no idea what you're talking about.

US + EU wanted to impose sanctions but China + Russia vetoed them. China is loving this.

I'm sure that most of these quotes don't mean shit to someone who's read the whole saga. For all we know these people could have learned their lessons, what's a story without a moral?

People these days are too cozy, that's the problem. They think everything is so stable and that we know everything. Sometimes I laugh and sometimes I cry when I see the foundations falling out from beneath their feet. You really think you even know about the existance of half the things we don't understand? Don't even answer the question, I'm just bitching, seriously I'm not even interested in this debate.

[ news.bbc.co.uk ]

They attacked the monks.

On one hand we have bush going to war because he's a corporate whore and on the other hand we have people like the taliban who'd like to run iraq themselves and have all the oil money for themselves(aka same reasons). Then we have the people who have been convince by these groups that the only defense for their country and culture is to blow themselves up. Then we have the people who don't care who leads them because they see them all as equally corrupt, as long as they're on the right side when whoever wins wins. I don't see poeple agreeing with these guys in the name of god. A suicide bomber may believe that he's doing it for god but at the forefront of his actions is the belief that he is giving his life for the survival of others(and thus serving god as well). These people have been manipulated to a disgusting degree on many levels. They are systematically seperated from their families and estranged from society. They can claim to do things in the name of god all they want but I don't believe it's fooling anybody who believes in god at this point.

We're not cheating our own existance. We're overpopulated. Birth control is beneficial to the survival of our species.

I agreee with Scott about prayer.. somethign that I always admired and truly appreciate about religious people is their ability to stay calm and look at the bright side in traumatic situatiions.

Most of them also believe that the strong should help the weak(i'm not trying to start a debate on whos strong and weak here, just stating a common religious point of view) and so they help others get through those situations too. Sometimes it doesnt matter why they are helping you or what they're saying, sometimes in those situations all people need is to hear a calm voice and to have the comfort of knowing that there is at least someone in the world can see good in everything, who has hope and the will to heal. They help people out no matter what they believe, what their sexual orientation is or the colour of their skin becuase even though they believe non-believers(or those who believe differently) are mislead and should convert but they also believe that we're all gods children and that some of those poeple they help will eventually "find god".

I don't agree with them that those non-religious or gay people are mislead but I do agree with their views about helping other people out. The common view in this non-religious society is that the best way to survive is by every man helping only himself but every man has a better chance of surviving if the others around him don't think the same way.

A truly religious person is interested in peace and has no benefit from war. I don't want to live in a religiously governed and superstitious society but we aren't in threat of this happening. Our society continues to move away from this religion which rests on unstable foundations. Fighting it would only delay the process if anything.

A low dollar favours exports.

There are many many things that seperate them from the rest. Most relgious people don't hate other relgious people. They only hate eachother when somoene manages to convince them that they should and it'll be as convincing to a relgious person as a non-religous person as you can see. I don't see any christians smearing shit on their muslim neighbours doorsteps or vice versa. Normal people have no reason to be at war with eachother. This hate you speak of exists for very few religious people and I don't see them acting on it because that would be majorly inconvenient to someone wanting to live in peace. They have about as much hate for eachother as people have hate for other races or ideologies.

Religion is a barrier as much as everything else. People will find any reason to hate eachother. People can chose to listen to the messages in their relgion instructed them against that or the ones instructing them for it. Clearly both exist. Which basically equates the religion to zero when it comes to whether or not to hate other relgions or accept them. It might as well not exist. Although I do agree it's used as a weapon it's not needed as one in the end. God isn't needed to convice the masses against someone, they'd be fighting no matter what. God is just the easiest way to get across to some people.

None of this "relgion is the root of all the worlds problems" crap adds up. None of it is manifesting in real life, it's just there in people's heads. I still haven't got an answer on what this war has to do with religion. Anyways we're all fucked. Fighting a non-existant enemy for the real enemy while they run amok. There's simply no weight or any kind of manifestation to your argument. It's a creation of a false reality based on a false lead and misinterpretation of historical knowledge. That's all it will ever be. Water.

The people standing in the rainbow are all very different.. that's the point. The idea is accepting eachother, not trying to change eachother because we believe we are better. It will happen when you learn to accept your fellow human beings, even if you believe they're complete lunatics, you have to accept them for that and let them live how they like if you want your rainbow. It's the easiest thing in the world to just let live. You will never convince a whole world to be united in one belief at once. You will never convince a whole world to abandon all belief. The solution to racism isn't to make a black man white is it?

Religion only diverts attention from the real problem. Humanity is doomed because they don't recongnise the weapons used against them and they forget everyday what they've been taught their whole lives. Tell me, what is it that culd have convinced you all that the problem in this war is religion? Did we get attacked by muslims or did we attack them? We attacked them. Bush doesn't give a crap about god. His god are the corporations operating beneath him. Furhtermore he has no cotrol over this god because even if he disagreed all of his so-called loyal employees would mobilise against him at the touch of a button. He doesn't even so much as have power over his own cabinet. Is it religion that gave birth to this system of governance? I think not. It's the same thing we've known to corrupt everything since we were wee ones. I don't know how anyone can forget or how they could possibly believe it's any different now. I wish it was religon, it would be so much esasier, you're all just being idealists here hoping that people aren't greedy but faithful. America is run by one thing and it's money. The enemy is a robot called corporation. It has no mind, just a buch of gears.
It's easy to turn a population against their own interests. You convince them that what's bad is good and what's good is bad. The sentiment around america and canada echoes the sentiment of germans way more than you know before ww2. From the mouth of Hitler himself, "Only one thing could have broken our movement: if the adversary had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed with extreme brutality the nucleus of our new movement." ( Speech to Nuremberg Congress, 9/3/33 )
The goal is different but the nucleus of their movement is the same. It's also not run by one man but rather is run by nobody. That's what's really scary about the whole thing. People didn't vote for Bush, they voted for Exxon and Exxon is nobody. Religion has nothing to do with this war and I ask you to remind yourselves at what point that it ever did. I must be missing something here.

For those who are too lazy to read my post i reiterate: what does this war have to do with religion? Thanks.

Maybe you should go work for the chinese government. They're obviously not killing enough religious people.

Seriously it's not that fragile. Raves are about having fun. It's not a press conference and you don't need permission to join.

If you don't know how it's relevant you should definitely study the holocaust. I hope you're not trying to argue with me about what you don't even know.

It really depends what you're striving to be free from. You can't be free from everything until your dead but some people would rather be free of certain things than others. Alone in the woods you're free from society. You wouldn't be free from survival duties but what you have to do to survive is quite different, it wouldn't depend on society.

You're obviously taking his comments a little too seriously. And no you weren't telling me to mourn for the dead no matter what they died for.. if that's really what you wanted to say than you wouldn't be supporting this 9/11 tribute crap in the frist place. You'd be mourning on your own time whenver you chose.

Anyways have fun mourning.