Chindie

It's a ridiculous argument saying that someone must be a quack because he/she doesn't agree with your viewpoint. It's like me saying because I didn't like a certain teacher at school - because he/she was a horrible person in my eyes and he/she made my life hell - everything he/she taught me at school, every book he/she recommended I read, every piece of homework was all a load of tosh, none of it could possibly be true. Time to waste some time. Your quote from Mr Schroeder there. It's quite meaningless. The likelihood of chance bringing about the universe and subsequently life occuring might have a probability similar to winning the lottery a million times in a row - it doesn't matter. Consider that by current understanding the universe to our knowledge is billions of years old - thats a quite unfathomable length of time, its a length of time so large that we struggle to comprehend just quite how big that is. Now, consider that that is simply how long we believe it has taken the universe to get from big bang, to now. In that length of time, life arose. It's rather a long time for chance to pay out. Now considering we also to bear in mind what happened for chance to make the universe itself arise. Who knows how long things were waiting around before the Big Bang, who knows how long that singularity that caused it was waiting for chance to hit the jackpot? But more than that... the chance is meaningless. Even if the chance was trillions to the power of Grahams number of all it happening, and the length time for it to happen was so unutterably tiny that it was insignificant, so small a length of time that the blink of an eye would seem an eternity, it wouldn't matter. Because you're sat on the result of the chance happening. The chance, the luck, the fluke of it happening... isn't the point. It did happen.

Yeah I expected as much. It just seems weird that the phone simply cannot make or receive calls, and seems to be up to texts sometimes and not others. I'll get to get back onto Voda.

Actually on Android phones and call issues, a friend of mine has a HTC Wildfire S, on Vodafone. Last couple of days has seen her have a lot of trouble with calls and texts. It goes through periods of not receiving texts at all, or allowing them, and on the call side seems completely dead. It still reports full signal though. I'd guessed at first something might gone awry with network settings but I would have thought that would have affected the texts completely, rather than the intermittent fault she appears to have. First port of call was Voda themselves of course but they cut her off their customer service line. Any ideas what it might be in case there is something she can do herself? Cheers again fellas. EDIT - I'm guessing its going to be a case of getting Voda to pull their finger out but maybe theres the slimmest chance somene here has had a similar problem and point in the direction of solution.

If it was so obvious that design was evident in life, you'd think that the people who really look at this stuff, the millions of biologists (particularly those looking at cell biology and evolutionary biology), and a considerable number of card carrying chemists, and probably throw in a few physicists too, would all be clogging up the churches mosques synagogues gurdwaras and standing stone monuments the world over. Funnily enough... they aren't. ...Any ideas why? I'm at a loss.

Please, I'll have you find it was a miracle. I've seen the light!

You don't learn anything by only talking to those which you agree with. But then some aren't out to learn I guess...

Another one with fingers in creation pies.

Thank you. Funnily enough no sooner do I think to mention the problem and it fixes itself. I did a quick restart on the phone this morning and lo and behold, a miracle, 3g signal. Very odd.

I honestly don't think they realise. A large number of believers never question their beliefs, imo. They were raised that way, they ultimately don't believe it to particularly impact on their lives and thus never think to question what their faith entails. They believe on a fairly mundane level, they have answers to big questions - why are we here? God. Fine, I never need to worry about that again - and so do not ponder it. They don't really notice that the Biblical god is a bastard and they are by their faith in it slaves to it if the book is to be believed and followed, because they haven't thought about it. Many probably don't even know those aspects to it, they are told that God loves them and Jesus died for them and they will go to paradise if they're good Christian boys and girls, and that is good enough for them. I can see the appeal of it. These are the big questions, and here are the correct, little, answers, now be on your way and worry no more. Saying 'I (or we) don't know' is scary, to many. We believe ourselves to be great, special, and are arrogant in our intelligence. To say 'This is our best guess but honestly, we can't say for sure' undermines that and many do not like it. To say 'You will die, and that is your lot', is terrifying to many on a personal level, and also on the same, higher, species level - we're so great we can't just die, there must be more, surely? And so the church gives you that. It's irony that the ones that do consider the flaws of their faith are the ones most absorbed by it. The fanatic is aware of doubt, because they understand that doubt can and will destroy the foundations of their faith. The Church of England knows that, death by a thousand cuts as they accept they don't know it all and might be wrong. So the fanatic, the fundamentalist, will seek to destroy the doubt. The fanatic becomes more fanatical the more they are threatened by doubt and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy... but the greatest irony of it all is the more fanatical they become the more they create doubt in the wider world.

I've had a bit of a demo frenzy over the last couple of days. Dragon's Dogma demo got released for non-Gold folks finally so I had chance to take a look at it. I desperately want to like it. But it's too... it's too Japanese I guess. Unwieldy controls, slightly confused gameplay decisions, odd decisions all over the shop. It feels like a game where lots of ideas were thrown at it, and a lot of them had great potential, but once they were in the game in a roundly workable fashion, nobody bothered to polish it. It may be that it's a poor demo that fails to explain how all this works but it felt lost in it all. It looks pretty enough and there are cool ideas (the very idea of large scale fantasy game with good third person combat is a simple one but rarely works out, for a start) but just doesn't work for me. Dirt Showdown looks like something Codemasters knocked up in a teabreak. Didn't blow my socks off. And the Hitman: Absolution Sniper Challenge. This is available to people who preorder the title through certain avenues. It's the most simple minigame tie in to the Hitman series you could imagine. You are Agent 47, your challenged with taking out a target at a party and as many bodyguards as possible with nothing but a trusty sniper rifle, 50 rounds, and your ingenuity. So what you get is 15 minutes from your snipers nest to get as high a score as possible, with bonuses being awarded for never arousing any suspicion, streaks of kill types (headshots and the like), and then challenges to take out targets in particularly interesting ways. Fail to kill the main target and you lose. It's great. Absurdly simple concept but it really works. I've only had a couple of cracks it at (and not done fantastically well, it benefits from replays as you spot different... opportunities around the environment) and enjoyed it immensely. Clocking onto the fact that that bodyguard on the lower walkway with good timing can be taken out by dropping that raised platform with barrels on it on his head by shooting out the supporting rope, and that this guard can be made to fall over the railing and thus leave no body if you nail him now is just... well, it's simple fun. As you build up points you unlock perks and the like COD style, reducing breathing sway on the sights and whatnot and it seems you also can unlock things for the full game out later this year. It's a really basic and simple little thing, and worth a look if you can get hold of a code for it. Having to put down a preorder to get it is a little stingey, and I've heard some retailers have said something like the preorder is entirely binding if you take up the download offer or other such madness so be careful if you just want to have a shot at this and aren't fussed about the game, but I think it's worth a look. Word is that they're thinking about making this into a little extra mode on the full release with extra scenarios and so on, which I think might be a good move.

The thing that would particularly annoy me about Diablo's always on net connection requirements is their refusal to acknowledge it was DRM first and foremost. You can only hope it follows in Steams footprints even more (which as noted by a few, particularly the Giantbombcast, was basically the same as this on launch with HL2) and ends up being stable enough that you don't notice (along with your own connection, of course), or lets you eventually set up an offline play state.

That's pretty much it for me too. People who "find" God, find one because they want to and need to, or else they have been taught there is one and so believe there is one. There's no evidence there is one, there's no rational or scientific explanation or proof or evidence there is one at all. Arguing there is, is ridiculous. Arguing that an old book is any kind of proof of any deity is equally ridiculous. At best it's evidence that some other people a long time ago thought there was a God, too, and that those people didn't have the benefit of knowledge and understanding that we have 2000 years later, as a result of the accumulated work and investigation and science in the 2 millennia since the book was started. Indeed. Whilst this isn't the foundation of my great disregard for religion, it's one of the more astounding things about it I find. It's the kind of thing that even a fleeting moment of common sense should make any right minded person see through - the chances are, even if there was a god that made us and all the rest of it, that this is book is entirely wrong. 2000 years of advancement has proven lots of it wrong. And thats before you get to 2000 years of it being translated and fudged about and edited comes into it. And so on. But no. We see even in this very thread people tying themselves in knots to prove (well, copy and paste proof) how it's obviously true and verifiable. Have a hint here, a glimpse of something that may be true, an argument of semantics post translation Satan knows how many times over. Of course it isn't. I'd at least have some respect for someone, like TheDon and Blandy would seem to here as well, if they could just say 'I'm scared of all this, and I need to hope theres something else out there, so I've placed my chips on this but I honestly cannot prove that I'm right, and I have to admit that for all I hope I'm right... the evidence right now suggests I'm not. I'm literally making an illogical, irrational leap of faith'. But nobody likes to admit they're a moron so nobody ever does (because who in their right mind is going to say 'I knowingly and intentionally believe/did something is contrary to all logic and understanding out there'? That isn't also possibly asking for a nice tight white jacket that does up at the back, that is), so we get the nonsense thats seen here, and elsewhere, all the time. Since a lot of it is evangelical as well it has to be combatted, and when it's particularly nonsense ridden and cynically intended to convert, given the short shrift and mockery it deserves, too.

And yet evangelism is at the heart of saving said pub and, as such, the good is tainted by an evil.

I've had another crack it at it today. It's just not fun after that first ending. And before that it wasn't really anything special.

Here's a strange problem for ya. Since the ICS update, my phone hasn't been able to get 3g signal. Orange recently, before the ICS update, sent me a configuration update message more or less once a week (the purpose of which were unbeknownst to me), so I assumed the 3g thing was just an issue they'd sort out on an update or something. But nope, nothing. I don't really use 3g much, in fact I actively didn't use it, but I liked having the option there. Now I don't. Any ideas?

It's astounding that so much effort is wasted on such patent nonsense that masquerades as factual.

Craig Gordon picks up a staggering amount of injuries for a keeper.

You wouldn't have thought what is at heart a metal band (albeit one that blurs a lot of boundaries) would produce such a relaxing song. But they did. Tool are **** awesome.

I rather suspect she'll already know this and have formulated how this fits in perfectly with Jehovah's mumbo. That or Watchtower had done it already and their word is infallible. Even when they predict the end of the world and get it wrong.

'God of the gaps', really. Except here we're taking crackpot theory, wedging into where we think we can, adding mumbo, to the jumbo, and going 'Behold, the LORD!'. It'd be sad if it wasn't so infuriating. Grown men and women. You almost have to laugh.

Yeah I think it's gone. Long story short, a debate on religion as per lead to the believers bringing out the 'latest research big guns' and tried to make us run down the local church by convincing us that the flood, the ark one, definitely happened. The proof? IIRC it went like this... - Cultures the world over have 'enormous devastating end of the world-esque' flood myths. So Noah happened - People think they know where the remants of the ark are. So Noah happened - A certain Chinese letter/word symbol (I'm not up on how Chinese script works exactly, anyway) features symbols that put together 'flood' and 'boat' and what not, so it's obvious the Chinese knew about this Noah thing and left a record in their writing, for all time. So Noah, Noah happened. Then we all went 'You're having a laugh right' and ripped the lot to shreds, but Sie and acouple of other chaps took the Chinese thing to heart and destroyed it - it's a really old myth, and it doesn't actually say anything of the sort in this particular symbol and the only people who believe it does are the ones that a) can't read Chinese, and desperately want to convince the gullible to convert. It was a fantastic unflinching, unarguable rebuttal and retort to it.

It may have pruned by now, or it is in one of the larger all encompasing threads... I'll have a mooch.

Solksjaer is a risk. Might be interesting though. Saying that I'm not convinced we'd actually get him - I think we might be a bit more conservative in our eventual appointment.

I hope someone can come torpedo this latest revelation. A bit like Sie, and others, waged a blitzkrieg on the 'OMG THE FLOOD HAPPENED! IT'S IN CHINESE LETTERS! LOOK!' stuff last year, and left it stone dead with facts. Rather like Mike, being a rational thinking human being and allergic to 'Ooga booga', I look at these revelations and immediately come to a conclusion that most people are already aware of. People are, and always have been, quite quite similar. It is quite likely that, seeing 'wonders' to a primitive people, like birds being able to fly, or the sun - the thing that defines their world, they would choose to think they are special. And so worship them. It isn't a surprise that these things are similar world wide. But of course, ti could be that they were all touched by a being that doesn't exist and chose to rebel against it. Incidentally, Pagan worship makes rather more sense on a pure level of understanding for a primitive people than any rubbish in the Bible. IT rather lacks dogma. 'The sun, it brings light! An enormous FIRE in the SKY that dominates us! Lets worship it!'. 'The River, mighty, bringing water, and sometimes death! It is powerful. We should worship it'. Aaaand so on.

Mates birthday tomorrow, we're off to Newbury racecourse, for some reason. The idea was that we'd all suit up for it and, I dunno, make it a bit classy. I just tried my suit on for the first time since July 2010. ...The trousers damn near screamed