jamesb

There's a few more tablet devices being announced at the moment: Hannspree outs £329 10.1in Android tablet ? reghardware Viewsonic intros £350 7in Android tablet ? reghardware

Where is the Certificate Revocation List actually held for your setup?

Concern over allowing administrative access to the network or data for a group of unknown parents who may, or may not be ethical enough not to take advantage of the access it grants them is ever so slightly different from a totalitarian communist state.

An IT Support in Education body is something I'd agree with - it's a single organisation dictating who is, and isn't, an IT Professional overall that I have my doubts about. There's too much variety and rapid change in the field overall for a single body to be giving out chartered status.

So how exactly do you qualify whether someone deserves to be a chartered IT professional? Degree? Completing an apprenticeship? Having years of experience? Having the right certificates? Any ideas?

An accountant is an accountant - they may just be working on different sets of figures. Even a forensic accountant is just an accountant. A banker is a banker, doctor is a doctor (with a range of specialisms admittedly, but not a huge range), a pharmacist is a pharmacist, dist is a dentist, plumber is a plumber and librarian is a librarian. An IT professional could be anything from a starting technician to an enterprise admin in charge of a global network of systems to a test team member/leader to a programmer to a network engineer, and so on. So do we have separate institutes for all of the thousands of disciplines that can make up IT, reviewed weekly as new technology comes onto the market, or one big one that wouldn't be able to list the different possibilities, let alone represent the various disciplines?

The MOD program came first.

He's not really calling non-skeptics idiots, just a certain type of hypocritical, close-minded personality - skeptic or not.

Trade you a bottle of mead after six months if you find you can spare some.

Where those laws restrict what people can do, then they need to be backed up by something more than just 'belief'. There is a right to freely practice your religion, but not to push the tenets of your religion onto someone else. Which is fine, so long as you are not trying to enforce the restrictive aspects of that worldview onto someone else. Even more so when you fail to adhere to it, and still try and legally enforce the principles. Just because a lot of people agree with something does not mean it is not idiotic, ignorant or wrong. It's really irritating when this argument comes up - some of the greatest social and charity work has also been carried out without the influence of a faith, other than a general belief that you should be nice to people. Equally some of the worst of human nature has come from a non-faith-based view. Why questionable? Not very open-minded of you. There's nothing wrong with skepticism, not per se, just generally nothing wrong with it. And why do you suggest that skeptics can't admire someone's moral code? In many ways an atheist who is a good person is more admirable than a theist, as their moral code is purely self-imposed rather than pressed upon them by hope of reward or fear of punishment. That wasn't the assertion he made. The assertion is that people who profess a particular code, try to impose it on others, but fail to follow it themselves are idiots. Not that those who profess a code and attempt to follow it, but occasionally fail are idiots - it only becomes idiotic when they are trying to enforce that code upon others. In other words if you're trying to force people into doing something, you better live up to your own standards.

3. Sit down and have a think about both options, then go for whichever one will make you happier. Option 1 does not rule out option 2. You could live with the parents for a while, as you make up your mind about what to do. If you're undecided then buy yourself time.

You are totally open to scientific information and theory - except when it questions religion, as you feel your beliefs are far above worldly experience, and are automatically correct through being somehow superior, outside reality, and more correct than the hundreds of other religions out there. And you accuse me of arrogance? No, you've claimed that my position is false, and your only reason for it being so is because your belief should trump any scientific evaluation of evidence. I still contend that your religion, your beliefs, are no more valid than any other religion, and no more so than the theory of the great space teapot. As has been said before - you don't seem to comprehend my point of view. I have no disrespect for religion, but I do for the idea that one religion is any more correct than any other belief structure based purely on assertions over evidence. Particularly when the main argument being presented for it is then that evidence is not required. An assertion is not evidence in the slightest. I can assert anything I want to. Incidentally it's quite obvious you don't understand what QED means. Quod erat demonstrandum - which is to be demonstrated - i.e. that which is definitively proven by the evidence put forwards.

There's always time to search the body.

How do you accidentally bury something in the garden? What else is buried there?

No! They make instant. My suggestion would be a Senseo. Wonderful coffee.

I always recommend the same training company to anyone who asks me - Firebrand do some exceptional residentials courses and are well worth a look. I've done several of them to date. To be honest, if you have the chance to explore the country then the boot camp probably isn't intense enough. I wouldn't recommend going for your cert in India.

Oh dear. Observation does not alter or decide the outcome - observation simply collapses the wave state into a single possibility, so that there is an outcome. There's still a lot of investigation going on into what makes up an 'observer'. There are a lot of misunderstandings about quantum theory and the role of the observer in the experiment. It is less important than pop science trash books try to make out. localzuk - I have to say that the causal interpretation makes for the best science fiction, and the best headaches.

It depends on how you learn - if you've got the experience and just need something to bring it all together then they can be invaluable, though they are very high pressure (the good ones anyway - usually about 12-14 hours study a day with breaks only for food over a week or two). If that suits your learning style, they're worth doing. If it doesn't then you're better off self-teaching or going with evening classes.

Mark, you seem to think that you can ignore anything that disagrees with your position, change your argument whenever you're challenged on something, never answer a question, and in various other ways argue very poorly. You really can't - it doesn't make your position look good.

Other than confirming my suspicion that your argument is based purely on semantics and 'cos I said so' rather than anything useful or firm, it's really not that interesting. Oh, and on claiming that religion is some special subject which can only be analyzed according to it's own rules.

Um. No, I suspect you might though. If your deity does not exist, the foundation of your religion is gone. Every premise built from that foundation is broken. Are you really saying it doesn't matter if your deity exists or not? In fact you've already stated that the foundation is the Nicene Creed. Now the first statement of the creed is that you believe in god. The second is that you believe Christ was the son of god. If you don't care about the existence of god then maybe you're not as Christian as you profess to be.

You are making an assertion that god exists. If you are not asserting that god exists, your entire religious structure is invalid. Is this really so hard for you to comprehend? If you have absolute evidence - present it. I do, and the moment that you present some sort of evidence I will consider it.

Another one of those misunderstandings that arise. We think something is beautiful, because it meets our sense of aesthetics - which developed by seeing certain things as good and certain things as bad. We are adapted to see awe-inspiring sights in the world and in the universe as being beautiful. It's no accident that we find them to be beautiful at all, but that doesn't mean that the things themselves are deliberately created - it is because our vision of them has adapted to enjoy them. I can sort of understand the need of people to find a purpose in life though. It can be somewhat hard to realise that there really doesn't have to be a divine purpose - simply being is enough. Who needs a deity when we are a product of everything that comes before us, and everything that comes after? Every single action we take has an effect on the destiny of the human species, no matter how small it may be. Honestly all the immortality that we need is to be carried forward by the repercussions of our actions and the ongoing development of the human race.

I'm hoping it's the second rather than the first. I quite enjoy being wound up in an argument - gives me a safe outlet for frustration between weapon practices. You believe in your religion. Your religion states that a deity exists, so you must believe in that existence to claim the religion. You are thus making a claim about existence of said deity. Does your religion make a difference to the way you act in your life? I suspect, as you seem to be one of those who believe that religion is one of the major drives behind altruism, that it does. In that case you are living your life by a set of rules which are supposedly imposed by $deity. If you are living your life by a set of rules that you have not decided, would you not like some evidence that they are correct other than the assertion put forward by relgiion? Nope. Can't check videos at work, and generally have other things to do when I'm at home. May take a look over the weekend, but having spoken with Jesuits before I doubt it's going to present anything new. Lies! The faith of the giant space teapot was founded by the holy cup which came to earth and carried forth its message through it's agents and the practice of reading tea leaves. It is divinely inspired. Yep. All religions (except the great space teapot) are equally invalid. Not quite - Rah, along with Apollo and many other sun deities have been adapted and absorbed into the Christian faith. Jesus is almost a direct analogue of Baldur for example. Oh, and there are people who do worship Rah. Neo-paganism runs along quite steadily, though generally focuses on Norse traditions. Again, right, there is no evidence of this - in fact according to religious arguments there can be none. That's been one of the main problems in this thread so far - the denial of the need for evidence. A psychological need still encoded into us which requires approval from and appeal to authority, possibly stemming from the time when we were not truly conscious and the 'gods' spoke to us directly (i.e. bicameral minds). Still, the repeating of a mantra and 'prayer' of a sort has been shown to be helpful, whether or not it is directed to a deity or just generally performed. It's a shame, but I have to agree with you on this as well. In my youth I thought Valhalla sounded like quite a nice way to relax after death. There's your mistake. You actually examined and looked at the subject. In many ways I'd quite like to be able to not try to examine and assess everything - it must be quite comforting to believe in a deity of some kind, and an afterlife. I've managed to adapt this by hoping that technology will develop to the point where I can upload myself before death.

Incidentally you're misusing the word proof. Science gathers evidence in support of a theory, and while a theory can be disproven it can never be definitively proven. A 'proof' of a theory is a mathematical proof - not an endorsement that the theory is true, but that it is an accurate and consistent model. Neither are logical proofs, proof in the way that you seem to be taking it. The same applies. A 'proof' is simply a demonstration that there are no internal flaws in a theory, and speaks nothing about the accuracy of that theory in relation to the real world.