ballzac

I don't think it's necessarily about what is "right". This is a private space, and it's "right" for people to be allowed to post whatever the owner of the space decides is in keeping with how he thinks the forum should present itself. So, while I do agree that any internet forum is a microcosm of society at large, the same ethical issues about free speech do not come into play. We do, as a community get to decide whether this is okay with us by choosing to use the service, or not. I cannot say that I am happy about any restrictions on how people express themselves, short of directing abuse at other members, and this includes posting pornographic pictures as well as holocaust denialism and any other crazy shit that has been posted here over the years. But I can also say that I think this place is one of the most accommodating places when it comes to allowing differing viewpoints, and I think it's unlikely that anyone would leave if porn got banned from here. I'm totally with you there. I couldn't care less if more circle-jerk threads pop up or not, but given a chance, I would vote against preventing people from starting them. I am genuinely sorry that you have had a rough time, but if images of naked bodies are traumatising for you, I can't help but feel that maybe you need help beyond being shielded from them. If every single person decided they wanted content removed because it bothered them, there would be no threads left on these boards.

I've heard you say if enough threads pop up about a particular topic to indicate that there is significant interest in that topic, then you might start a new subforum for it We have plenty of threads here about topics that aren't particularly related to ethnobotany, and many of them are more common than the porn threads. The implication being that women are highly sensitive and must be protected from being offended? Every member of these forums is an adult (as far as I know), and should be capable of making the decision not to click on a thread tagged "NSFW" if they think they will find the content distasteful.

Is that a quote from "Mein Kampf"? But in all seriousness, policies like those you propose cannot possibly lead to good. We all have ideas about what kind of people we should have in our society, and how do you determine who gets to decide what kind of people can procreate? Yes, we do it to some extent when we send people to prison for life, but the prime goal of that is to protect society from the individual, not to prevent their genes from propagating to the next generation. I'm not sure what you mean by "dilute the genepool" or "anti-evolution". Nothing is really anti-evolution. Evolution is what occurs when there is diversity in a population and external pressures are imposed on that population. Under certain conditions there will be a certain set of pressures, and under another there will be another set of pressures. It all leads to changing genetic characteristics within populations.

I have a feeling there is a fair amount of information about maidenii on these forums and elsewhere if you search for it. If you have done so and don't have the answers you are after, it can help if you explain what information you've found, why you are still unclear on the answers, and what conflicting information you have found, so that people know you have put some effort into trying to find the answers yourself. Then you will find some really knowledgable members will be eager to help clarify any points of uncertainty or debate.

Yep, have to agree with you there, and that's why I made it a point early in this thread that it's the principle that I don't have a problem with. There are many problems that can arise in practice. Nonetheless, I think the casual users that Gilligan talks about can suck it up and abstain for a few months, and I think most opiate or alcohol addicts would still be better off under some supervision/guidance than none at all. Unfortunately, there can't possibly be enough resources to provide top notch treatment for everyone. But if a particular treatment provider caused miscarriage or damage to a child by forcing a quick detox on the patient, that would surely open them up to litigation and would, if nothing else, provide a financial incentive to approach the problem in a more rational and educated way. I personally wouldn't go so far as to say making bad choices makes a person a bad parent. It depends on the severity and frequency of the bad choices, and the intent, as well as the redeeming choices they've made at other times. I don't think there's a parent out there who has made all the right choices every time. Surely, though, part of being a good parent is recognising bad choices as being bad choices, and not making excuses for them. The question is, would you put #insert substance name here# into your child's IV bag? If not, then it's something you probably should be avoiding while pregnant unless you have a medical condition (which may include addiction) that requires you to take it for the safety of you and your unborn baby.

Any reputable rehab programme will understand the complexities involved here, and treatment does not inherently mean cold turkey. The important thing is that whatever treatment is decided upon is evidence based and focussed on the interests of the child. Avoiding treatment altogether is not in the best interests of the child. Do you think that a pregnant woman who is addicted to opiates is better able to minimise the harm that will be caused to her baby by going it alone, scoring uncontrolled doses off the street, than under the supervision of a skilled addiction specialist?

I was hoping the threat would defuse the situation . Just remember that you get a limited number of warn points before you're auto-booted (IIRC) so you might want to be careful about squandering them. It's a highly emotional topic for most people, but it's also an important debate to be had, in my opinion, so I don't want to have to lock and report the thread (it's not my part of the forums) just because two members can't behave as civilly as all the other members involved in the discussion.

This is true, but snus is extremely low in TSNAs, which seem to be the most significant carcinogens in other oral tobaccos. There is enough research at this stage to tentatively say that it is quite safe when compared to other forms of tobacco. The lakeland twists are dark fire-cured tobacco, and probably second only to the indian chewing tobaccos when it comes to harm to health.

You guys are in for a treat. The kendall twists are the best form of bacci IMO (apart from being less safe than snus). I personally prefer the plain ones, but they are all far better than the heavily sweetened american chewing tobaccos. If you're hardcore try chewing an inch of it with about 1/8th tsp of bicarb soda and don't spit at all until you start sweating

A lot of the time when older research is regularly quoted outside of the literature, it can be an indication that there is some confirmation bias. That is, certain groups hold a certain position, so they repeatedly quote one or two papers from decades ago that agree with their position, while ignoring the most recent research. Alternatively, it can be an indication that there hasn't been much research since, and it is the only available work to cite. Older research will often be cited within the scientific literature, but in any serious work it will always be woven into a framework that tells a story about what our understanding used to be, what the pioneering work was, how our understanding has changed, whether earlier work has been validated by more recent results, etc. Here is the abstract from the paper based on this research I cannot find the full article, so if anyone has it, I'd personally be interested in reading the full methodology. One thing that jumps out at me here is the small sample size. Considering the controls, they may have had, for example, a category of first-time mothers between the ages of 20 and 25 years whose annual income is < $5000. Given that there were 59 children in the study, this group may have had 2 or 3 children of cannabis users compared with two or three children of non-users. Not that I'm suggesting that this is the case, but considering that a drug that is guaranteed to cause severe abnormalities in 4% of children may not even show a difference in a single study that looks at the children of only 30 mothers who use it, it's worth questioning whether a small study like this, alone, is good enough evidence. This is a more recent study, which had a whopping sample size of 24,874, and also attempted to control for use of other drugs:

<mod hat> It's a rule here that you need to discuss things in a civil manner. Next person to even imply an insult directed at another member will earn a warn point. </mod hat> Gilligan, what's wrong with playing it safe for 9 months? I mean, the data is far from conclusive, but the more data comes in, the more it seems like playing it safe is the way to go. For example, the recommendation for alcohol used to be that you could have one or two standard drinks a week, but as more data has come in, they have discovered that there really does not appear to be a safe level of alcohol that will do no damage. I'm not sure on the current status of cannabis, but it's likewise probably better to be safe than sorry. With smoking, it's very rare that anyone would have one or two cigarettes during a pregnancy. People either care enough to stop, or they just smoke throughout. There are other drugs that are well known to cause problems for unborn children, and many of these are of an addictive nature and not the sort of thing that most users are doing casually. Then there are many more drugs that simply aren't well enough studied for us to even know what the long term effects are. If a person is unable to stop using substances for 9 months, perhaps they're not mature enough to be having children anyway? And this goes for partners too. Of course, it depends on the specifics of the relationship. For example, my girlfriend smokes, but as for drinking, she can mostly take it or leave it, so if she was pregnant, I would consider it supportive for me stop using nicotine products for the duration, but it probably wouldn't bother her at all if I kept on having the occasional drink. But if you and your partner are accustomed to going out partying together every weekend, I think it would be beyond inconsiderate to continue going out and getting pissed and leaving your pregnant partner at home. But ultimately, the person who is effectively a life-support system for an unborn child has the final responsibility of making sure they are looking after that child and not potentially contributing to health problems that will affect them for their entire life.

It's not really relevant to the pro-choice movement, because the pro-choice/pro-life debate is all about whether the foetus is a person or not and whether they should be afforded the protections offered to a person or not. If damaged foetuses were miraculously cured at birth, then you would be right, because the appropriateness of this kind of law would then hinge on whether damage caused to a foetus, in and of itself, was equivalent to child abuse. But that is not the case here. If your behaviour during pregnancy causes damage to the foetus, this causes lifelong medical and developmental problems for the child, who both the pro-life and the pro-choice proponents would agree is a person.

http://video.bobdylan.com/desktop.html interactive film clip for "like a rolling stone"

Wouldn't it be more hypocritical if it wasn't included? I do worry about how things like this can be misused, but I don't see anything wrong with it in principle. We take children away from their parents when they are being caused harm by their actions. How is this any different? Use of many drugs during pregnancy cause irreparable damage to the child. It's not much different to the psychological damage caused by sexual abuse or physical damage caused by shaking a baby. Either it's okay to take children away from their parents when they are being abused, or it's not. And under this particular legislation, the mothers are given the opportunity to keep their baby if they undergo treatment, an offer that's not always available to perpetrators of other forms of child abuse.

Well, as a lot of people have suggested already, I think this is just another case of someone using ideas from quantum mechanics to try to validate their conjecture. There is nothing about the double slit experiment that in any way proves anything about the nature of consciousness. It does seem that observation is intrinsically linked to the behaviour of what is being observed, but this doesn't have any bearing on whether consciousness creates the universe or whether the universe creates consciusness. Not really, it demonstrates that there is no way to measure the location of a particle without disturbing its momentum and causing the mutual coherence of the waves from each slit to be lost. Anything beyond that is conjecture. I could just as easily say the experiment proves there is an invisible turtle called Bob who changes waves to particles every time someone tries to measure the location of the particles in the two slit experiment, but until I come up with some testable prediction that would validate this hypothesis, it is as much conjecture as the claims Lanza is making.

I use photobucket, but all the ones I've tried are pretty much the same. If it gives you a BBCode link, which will look like [img=http://sitename.com/imageurl.jpg] or possibly the same but with url tags as well, you can use that. Otherwise you can right click on the image and choose "copy image url" (if you're using chrome) and type the img tags yourself and paste the image url in between them. Edit: argggg... it keeps changing the tags. What I'm trying to type is [ IMG]http://sitename.com/imageurl.jpg[ /IMG] but without the spaces.

couldn't get on for ages earlier

There are some good online java based sequencers, drum machines and synthesisers that can help you get to grips with the basics and help you decide what features you want before forking out cash and delving deeper into more technical software. I can't give you any names off the top of my head, but you should be able to find some with the help of google. The sequencers and drum machines are good because it helps you learn how to put together loops without having to know how to program a synth. The synthesisers are good because they are much simpler than some of the more complicated additive and FM VST synthesisers, so they allow you to experiment with amplitude and filter envelopes without having to know anything about the more complicated aspects of these synthesisers. After a fair bit of mucking around, you will find that there are things you would like to do that cannot be done with them, and then you know it's time to upgrade to a 'real' VST additive synth. It also depends on what you want to do. Ultimately, if you want to craft every sound, you will need a DAW and at least one good VST synth. If you want to use single hit samples, then a DAW using either an inbuilt, or better quality plugin, sampler. If you want to mix full loops and samples together, you may be able to do this with a DAW like ableton or flstudio, but there are programs better designed for this task. I haven't looked into it lately, but back in the day it was Sonic Foundry Acid Pro that was the software of choice for this type of work. As I personally do mostly the first option, that's what I can give the best advice on. Any decent DAW will do for this. I use ableton these days, but I used to use flstudio and I wouldn't necessarily say one is better than the other. They just have different interfaces that take getting used to, but the capabilities are mostly the same. As for a synth, NI Massive is well and truly my synth of choice because it's both user friendly and powerful. Absynth and FM8 are both also extremely powerful, but much harder to program. There are plenty of other good softsynths, but nothing I know of has the power of the NI synths, though there are some unique sounds that can only be obtained using certain synths. Plenty of my tracks use only Massive, even for drums and other percussion!

I know I've made a point of this many times before, but I think a lot of people still don't get it... This is SOOOOOOOO important. People don't realise that they are doing the community a disservice by avoiding posting about bad experiences in the rep forum. They don't want to look like an arse by posting something negative, but they end up being an arse by not posting it. If someone is late with one or two trades, it doesn't make them a bad trader, but as Torsten said, other members can make their mind up about whether they want to take the chance based on how many people had a problem with the trader and the nature of the problems. And if a trader gets upset because you posted factual statements in their rep thread (I'm not aware of this having happened, but it seems to be what people are afraid of), then that is on them and not on you. How unfair on a member who looks at another member's trade rep thread and sees one hundred positive comments, to pay for an item and when the item doesn't arrive find out that they were the tenth person who this had happened to but the first nine were too coy to provide accurate feedback. When someone gets found out to be a scammer, there are always people who come out and say "this happened to me, but it was only a $20 trade and I assumed that it got lost in the post". Well, they should have said that in the trade rep thread. If it really did get lost in the post, you will not be hurting the trader by posting this factual information in a thread with dozens of positive comments. But if ten people in a row have the same experience, then it gets less and less likely that it actually was lost in the post, and future potential buyers can make their mind up about whether it's worth the risk dealing with (and potentially giving large amounts of money to) this member. Many of the people who have been scammed out of large amounts of money laid down this cash after several people had already been scammed out of small amounts. A person who thinks their $20 loss is not worth complaining about may end up costing someone else hundreds of dollars by not 'complaining'. Also, while the trade rep forum is not a discussion forum, it is also unlike ebay in the sense that there is infinite space to qualify any complaints you have. On ebay you may have to choose between "great seller. A+, very happy" and "always late with postage", on here you can go into detail and say something like: "Condition of the items was perfect and very happy with what I got for the price. Have bought from this member many times and have always found them to be slow in getting things out, sometimes as much as a couple of months, but when it's been longer than a couple of weeks they have always thrown a few freebies in to make up for the inconvenience. Will definitely purchase from this member again in the future." ^if it's completely factual, it gives subsequent buyers what they need to make an informed decision about how a trade with this member is likely to pan out. /verbose rant

This is probably more suited to a bug forum, but since I'm not a member of one, and we have lots of members who are knowledgeable about our flora and fauna, I thought it would be worth trying here I found about a hundred of these in the carpet. At first I noticed a couple from a distance and thought they were mouse droppings, but upon closer inspection I realised they were some kind of egg sac or larva. I realised there were more under the surface of the carpet, and the more I looked, the more I found. Most of them are quite deeply buried, and they could have been there for a while without me noticing. My first thought was maybe cockroach egg sacs, but looking up pics, they look to be pretty rectangular, whereas these are quite round. They don't appear to be beetle larvae, because they don't have any hairs or 'legs' (not that I can see anyway). Not sure there's much more information I can give. The pic says most of it. They're about 8mm long. The temps here are getting pretty low still (~3C at night) but we leave the heating on about 16C most nights, which is probably nice and cozy for these little things. I don't know how widespread the infestation is, but I looked in another room and after some searching around in the carpet I found one, so my guess is that they're probably all over the house. It's hard to know what steps to take when I don't know what they are. Any thoughts? Cheers

looks like you guys are probably right. I'd never seen flies in the pupal stage before, so it never occurred to me. Bit of a relief to be honest, because flies are pretty easy to deal with. I've got one sitting in a jar now. Thanks everyone

There might be a 50 post minimum as well. There has been at some stage, but this might have changed. Here's more information (from the FAQ) if you haven't seen it already. Display name can only be changed once every 12 months How to change your display name The upshot is that the only exceptions to the limitations is if theres a pressing reason to change it. For example, if you run into legal problems that are tied to your display name and need to become more anonymous. In your case, you just want to change it to match the name you're known by at other places, so if you can't do it by the usual means, you'll just have to wait. If you can't change it, what I would suggest is to put the other name you're known by as your member title or in your sig, or both.

something like that. I had no idea how to say "meditator", and "san" would have put the on ('syllables') over. Punctuation may have helped, cos the first two lines are meant to be one sentence. It was meant to be something like "Mediation wants the prize. There is no haiku"

This is the first post I've seen of yours that isn't a haiku