If money weren't an object, it'll always come down to how lazy I am about some things.
Spiders are important to the ecosystem. Wasps can DIAF.
Truly the hardest part of realizing/considering my own lack of belief in god/a higher power/whatever was the struggle to come to terms with atheism = can't believe in ghosts. It sort of sounds ridiculous, but I think about it all the time.
I'm forever a freeware/open source enthusiast, if it's available for free I will use it.
YES THIS IS HOW I FEEL ABOUT WASPS. THEY DO NOTHING EXCEPT RADIATE HATRED. THEY CAN ALL DIE.
Hmm for me it's less a matter of belief and more a matter of "this belief in disembodied spirits seems to spring up rather persistently AND independently of culture or religion; why is that, could it mean that there is something to be discovered there?" Of course it's possible that the only discovery to be made is "humans are superstitious as fuck" but you know :D
huh for me it's not really an ethical question. like, i don't think it's ~morally superior or anything. i just really enjoy using things made with geeky love -- even though a lot of paid programmers are also geekily proud of what they make for the large software companies, it just isn't the same. idk how to explain it /o\
Not so! They are essential to the wide success of figs, especially for the edible varities, and are a key pollination vector in several orchid species and a great many wildflowers, particularly in the Americas. Recent research has also confirmed that they are highly under-appreciated as generalised pollen carriers and there are some suggestions they may be taking up some of the slack from the downturn in bee species across much of the world, though this is mostly anecdotal at this time. I can supply links if science will sway you in your anti-waspness.
But their main food source is other insects; generally speaking their pollination is a side effect/fringe benefit and they can be replaced with honeybees and butterflies.
Obviously the answer is breed moar varieties of bees and bumblebees that won't randomly drop dead like the honeybees have been; they are fuzzy and not MADE OF HATRED like wasps are.
(But okay, wild wasps who nest away from human settlements can stay. Yellowjackets who nest in/near houses and eat people food can all drop dead i don't actually give a shit if that means fewer orchids. :D)
lol no worries i just feel really strongly about wasps ALSO wtf you weren't even on my flist??? i don't know why??? /fixes
the first question is basically -- for example, Photoshop costs like a grand and lets you edit photos, make animated gifs, and add cool effects (among other things). You can ALSO do all those things just as easily with free programs that don't cost anything (to wit: irfanview, Photoscape, paint.NET if you're a PC), but there isn't really one that does ALL of those things (except GIMP, but GIMP has a super steep learning curve so it doesn't count as "easy"). I'm a free-software kind of person (not free as in pirated but free as in developed and maintained by dedicated enthusiasts) and wouldn't pay for Photoshop even if I had the money (which I don't -_-;;).
ahehe - so I answer the question WRONG, but got added? I like it :D
I really did hesitate because my husband hates wasps, and so do my kids. They are nasty little bastards, but we only get them for about a month really in the UK. Maybe we could compromise and decimate both wasp and spider numbers by 50%? :D
Thank you for explaining the software question. If money really is no obje/ct, I'll sometimes pay for convenience, but I'd guess the individual freeware is often going to be better in the first place?
Ugh here in southern Ontario wasps are a constant presence as soon as the sun is out for longer than 2 days in spring and they don't go away until WELL into autumn. we hates them, precioussss
freeware is not always better! some so-called freeware is bundled with mandatory adware or even trojans and you have to be really careful and research it before you use it-- with most big-name software makers you can be sure you're not getting a virus. with freeware, you have to do your homework before installing. some of it is astonishingly better than non-free software or shareware but a lot of it is horrid crap.
Ugh, I'm lucky that as a college student, I can either download a lot of the expensive stuff through our school for free or use the school computers which have it preinstalled. I have little use for the adobe suite, but I used openoffice for six years and really do prefer microsoft office to it. (This was a difficult realization!) Of course I prefer LaTeX to word and MATLAB to excel, but it's hard to find a good replacement for powerpoint... Openoffice's version has awful alignment issues when you try to open it in microsoft's.
The "student special" stuff wasn't as ubiquitous when I was a student; I'm actually really glad that became a thing (even though I'm not happy that it basically forces people into using a particular software suite for the rest of their lives because most people don't like change and prefer to use what they already know). I hated OpenOffice on sight and I really was unhappy about that but it couldn't be helped -- though I'm not particularly a fan of Word either. I actually use Google's versions of Word and Excel and Powerpoint most often outside of work contexts and I find them adequate? I mean, it's still M$ but at least you don't pay for it. xD
OpenOffice really has a lot of challenges in getting everything to play nicely with Microsoft though, so I can't blame them.. It's Microsoft's fault for having bloated file formats.
I have an unfortunate email structure where I have a ~secret~ email that is my main account and everything forwards to it. This makes using Drive kind of terrible, since I have several email accounts and never know which one "owns" the particular document.
I don't remember this, but when I was very young I had a friend, an male adult that no one else ever saw but with whom who I'd have rather detailed conversations. My mother was convinced that I'd met the ghost of the house we were living in. It's not my only experience like this, but it's the only time I've talked with one. Most recently was about a year ago at a friend's home, when I saw a male figure in a doorway who I thought her husband out the corner of my eye. By the time I'd turned to say hello, the figure had disappeared. I mentioned it to her and she was rather startled because they'd recently moved her father in law's urn to the room where I'd seen the figure.
That's so spooky!!! See most science nerds would be like you were obviously hallucinating but I'm a science nerd and a science fiction nerd and I have srs Theories about the data in the brain and its possible persistence beyond physical death. /hides
I'm a science nerd too. I would have put it down to being mistaken because I never saw him directly; seeing something out the corner of my eye could have been hair flicking around my face or a bug or something but I had no reason to think there'd be anyone else there. At that point I didn't even know the father in law had passed away some years ago! I've never had an experience of seeing a ghost of someone I've known. The closest I've ever come to that was dreaming about my grandmother the night after she passed away - an intense, full colour dream in her kitchen as it was when I was a little girl and she looked like she did then. She told me she loved me and said goodbye before she disappeared. It's not the same as seeing a ghost, but I've never had another dream in my life which felt like real life either.
My theory is that some ghosts are echoes in time and some are wishful thinking :)
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Spiders are important to the ecosystem. Wasps can DIAF.
Truly the hardest part of realizing/considering my own lack of belief in god/a higher power/whatever was the struggle to come to terms with atheism = can't believe in ghosts. It sort of sounds ridiculous, but I think about it all the time.
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YES THIS IS HOW I FEEL ABOUT WASPS. THEY DO NOTHING EXCEPT RADIATE HATRED. THEY CAN ALL DIE.
Hmm for me it's less a matter of belief and more a matter of "this belief in disembodied spirits seems to spring up rather persistently AND independently of culture or religion; why is that, could it mean that there is something to be discovered there?" Of course it's possible that the only discovery to be made is "humans are superstitious as fuck" but you know :D
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Or "humans are terrified of death"!
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well yes that too xD
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Obviously the answer is breed moar varieties of bees and bumblebees that won't randomly drop dead like the honeybees have been; they are fuzzy and not MADE OF HATRED like wasps are.
(But okay, wild wasps who nest away from human settlements can stay. Yellowjackets who nest in/near houses and eat people food can all drop dead i don't actually give a shit if that means fewer orchids. :D)
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I didn't even understand the first question. This was not my finest poll, I'm happy to admit.
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the first question is basically -- for example, Photoshop costs like a grand and lets you edit photos, make animated gifs, and add cool effects (among other things). You can ALSO do all those things just as easily with free programs that don't cost anything (to wit: irfanview, Photoscape, paint.NET if you're a PC), but there isn't really one that does ALL of those things (except GIMP, but GIMP has a super steep learning curve so it doesn't count as "easy"). I'm a free-software kind of person (not free as in pirated but free as in developed and maintained by dedicated enthusiasts) and wouldn't pay for Photoshop even if I had the money (which I don't -_-;;).
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I really did hesitate because my husband hates wasps, and so do my kids. They are nasty little bastards, but we only get them for about a month really in the UK. Maybe we could compromise and decimate both wasp and spider numbers by 50%? :D
Thank you for explaining the software question. If money really is no obje/ct, I'll sometimes pay for convenience, but I'd guess the individual freeware is often going to be better in the first place?
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freeware is not always better! some so-called freeware is bundled with mandatory adware or even trojans and you have to be really careful and research it before you use it-- with most big-name software makers you can be sure you're not getting a virus. with freeware, you have to do your homework before installing. some of it is astonishingly better than non-free software or shareware but a lot of it is horrid crap.
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I have an unfortunate email structure where I have a ~secret~ email that is my main account and everything forwards to it. This makes using Drive kind of terrible, since I have several email accounts and never know which one "owns" the particular document.
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My theory is that some ghosts are echoes in time and some are wishful thinking :)
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