You conveniently forget that the government shall also make no law prohibiting the free expression of religion. The Constitution has balance, it's extremely well-thought-out. Your post is all one-sided, and so is the way the Constitution has been interpreted in the last few decades. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.
If you do not have freedom from religion, then you do not have freedom of religion. Without freedom from religion, it must be understood that there is some requirement that you adhere to some religion, recognized as such by the state. How can you possibly interpret that as religious freedom? The state should avoid meddling in the affairs of religion, and should take no action to endorse or support any religion, except in cases where such support is offered to any and all religions. To do otherwise is to allow the state to play favorites with religions.
Maybe you can explain to me how keeping the government separate from religion, in that it can neither promote nor endorse, nor suppress nor oppose any religion, is a bad thing? What, precisely, is the problem with that?
During the early years of Federal government, under our current Constitution and while the creators of it were still alive, States actually sponsored different denominations. That's right. There was State sponsored religion, but not Federal sponsored religion. Thomas Jefferson even started a church that met in the Capitol building that had 2,000 people attending it on a weekly basis. The founding fathers saw nothing wrong with expressing their religious beliefs wherever, and whenever, they so desired. They just recognized that it was wrong to oppress someone who disagreed with them on religious issues. At the same time they weren't going to allow anyone else to oppress them because of their beliefs.
State-sponsored churches existed in some places into the mid 1800s. They were unconstitutional, but tradition is a tough thing to overcome, so they took some time to go away. Jefferson didn't start a church either. There were services held in the capitol for those who lived and worked there.
The strange thing to me is that many of the people who came to the U.S. did so to escape religious persecution. Of course they proceeded to persecute each other when they got here anyway. Keeping the government out of it is the best way to prevent any particular sect from gaining a foothold and the ability to sway the government to support or oppose other religious groups. Funny how so many conservatives who supposedly don't trust the government not to abuse its power are so quick to try to give it domain to support their own religion, completely forgetting that that power can also be abused, and your people won't always be in control.
The "wall of separation" letter was written to a church who feared they would be oppressed by the government because they were small. His letter was in response to that. The context makes all the difference. He wasn't saying there couldn't be any religious display on public premises. He was reaffirming the idea that the government could not restrict that group's right to worship as they pleased.
You're reading a lot into that letter that wasn't actually said. He was a politician too, after all. Politicians know how to placate their constituents. He obviously didn't buy into the Christian religion, even if he thought well of some of the tenets.
If you really fail to see how that verse applies in an argument over whether Christian ethics are compatible with freedom (and by extension free enterprise), I suggest you find a class in remedial reading comprehension. If, however; you merely protest to my use of a single set of verses without the full context of scripture, I'll be happy to address the point more thoroughly.
Now if only you could get Christians to all agree on interpretations of scripture, as well as which ones are applicable, which ones take precedence over others, what caveats apply, etc. The term "Christian ethics" implies some unified set of beliefs, but Christianity is hardly unified.
>By definition a Troll is someone who makes defamatory ad hominem comments about the poster, instead of bothering to legitimately address the subject of discussion.
That would actually be a "flamer".
A troll is someone who deliberately presents a false and/or stupid opinion in order to generate a reaction in their audience.
Welcome to the internet!
Of course the troll definition actually applies better to the GP post than flamer anyway.
They're also attempting to fabricate facts, ignore facts, and spread religious and philosophical intent into what should be textbooks, not books on philosophy and religion. These board members are doing a disservice to their constituency. They should be removed from their positions, as they have cleary been (IMHO) irresponsible
What? We're removing people for putting bias into textbooks now?
I'm intrigued by who you think will be left to teach after your purges have been carried out.
I study the history of history, and it's very fascinating to watch this Texas process happen. It's a reaction to a trend that's been going on since the 1960s, which has been more or less looking at history through a politically correct lens. In the 1950s, the crusades were considered a just war. Kids raised today were raised instead by a series of textbooks that portrayed them as a war of European aggression against the innocent people living in the Levant.
In honesty, the first is closer to the truth, but if you mention this to anyone raised by the modern system, they will sputter and become outraged if you claim the crusades had some justification to them. They know what they know, but they don't know what they know is wrong.
Note: I disagree with many of the Texas changes, but there is a politically correct bias in the majority of modern day historical scholarship, that I think they have a legitimate reason to respond to.
What's "politically correct" depends entirely upon your politics. This is a group of fundamentalist Christians rewriting history to agree with their politics. Even though they make up a small percentage of the country, they wield disproportionate power in Texas due to the adoption of Texas books by many other states. That they have attempted to rewrite science as well just shows that they have no regard for the facts that disagree with their mythology and worldview.
Really? Congress hands its authority off to a slew of science-technocratic authorities every day... the EPA, OSHA, etc. None of these bodies are elected, and yet they arguably have a huge and often expensive impact on our lives. They're literally the very model of a technocratic government that views "expertise" as more important than democratic self-rule.
I'd say Ike's second part was not only relevant, but turned out to be just as prophetic as the first military-industrial part.
Those authorities aren't appointed for life like USSC justices. They're appointed by the democratically elected representatives of the people to do a job that they should have an appropriate level of expertise in. We could go with a more direct democratic approach, but I don't think it would be an improvement. Just look at California's problems cause by their referendum system that allows people who don't know shit about an issue to make decisions for the state.
If I want to send my kid to private school, they don't let me opt out of paying for the public schools.
That's because you aren't paying for your kid's education. You are paying for a public education system. This is why non-parents also pay the same taxes. Society benefits from a public education system.
Sure, but it's still wrong to say that the schools are free.
Ok, lets say then, a "cheaper" option is public school, or that "more expensive options are available."
Roads are not free. Police are not free. Traffic lights are not free. Parks are not free. wtf cares that public education is not "free." Its an option you do not have to incur additional cost to undertake, vs the alternative "choices" you have.
Don't like the policies? Either don't go to public school, move, or get political and do something about it.
I care that it's not free, and I took issue with you saying that it was. I've been supporting the movement to get vouchers implemented in Texas, but unfortunately that hasn't happened except in limited experimental trials in certain areas. I'd rather take as much of my money as I can get back from the government and send my kids to a school where the curriculum isn't dictated by a pack of utter morons like the majority of the Texas State Board of Education. Of course I'm trying to get rid of the idiots on the board as well. Hoping that Rebecca Bell-Metereau gets elected this time around, as well as a few other sane people taking on the incumbent idiots.
Really? Because I refuse to purchase anything on Steam.
Any service that takes away all my control of something I've "purchased" isn't something I will use. It brings the underlying problem of software "sales" to light very clearly. Somehow all these companies seem to ignore first sale doctrine and property rights by the practice of granting "licenses" on whatever unreadable terms their lawyers manage to stuff into the EULA.
If the price is low enough, I'm willing to forego first sale rights. I never sell my games anyway, so Steam and Impulse sales save me lots of money. If you do plan to resell the games, then sure, don't use Steam, but for people like me, it's a great way to get games cheaply and conveniently.
You're only reading one side of the story. Maybe this kid got warned a couple of dozen times already; maybe they sent notes home, talked to the parents, and so on.
How about a week detention for consistently breaking the rules every day since the start of the year?
The story is highly incendiary and only provides limited info. Maybe the story should read: "The little darling has been warned 287 times so far this year; she continued to sneak candy in and even got her friend to bring candy. We can't abide rule breakers like that."
Well we could make up all kinds of scenarios if that's what we want to do, but since that isn't the information we have to go on, there's really no point in it. Maybe TFA leaves things out. That wouldn't be surprising. Since we don't know though, it doesn't really make sense to just start assuming things without any basis. The missing info, if there is any, could support either side.
If you want to attend FREE school, you absolutely must abide by the state/district policies. Don't like it? You have a choice: Private school. Actually, there's another choice: Home school.
Since when is it free? They've raised our property taxes a few times now to generate more funding for the public schools in the area. They're hardly free. If I want to send my kid to private school, they don't let me opt out of paying for the public schools.
Yeah, I like those types too. I tend towards those, along with skill-based FPS games and some open-world games like Oblivion (plus lots of mods). Of course I also recently got into Just Cause 2 because it's just some ridiculous fun and I can play it for 20 or 30 minutes at a time just to take a break.
You call "arriving at correct results" "Shoddy and careless"?
What? No, that's not how it works.
Let's say I look into a crystal ball and say, "My crystal ball is round, therefore the Earth is round." Have I done anything even remotely scientific? Should anyone assign any credibility to my results?
Huh? How is using methods that aren't considered optimal by statisticians anything at all like taking a wild guess?
Or make a quality game, like Chrono Trigger. Huge world, multiple endings, long but focused storyline(s), characters progressing differently depending on who you team them up with, and a lot more that makes the game hugely replayable and enjoyable.
Chrono Trigger was a good game and had a good story, but the battle mechanics were really repetitive. That's the part that got very tiresome for me.
You do realize that decrying homosexual marriage restrictions and claiming theocracy in the same post is hypocritical right? You realize that if it wasn't for a theocracy (Christian/Rome) the state would have no interest in a... wait for it... SACRED institution like Marriage.
MY view is that the state should have no laws either establishing or punishing people for their "marital status". It should not care one way or another.
But that would break all sorts of "social programs" (like the new Health Care Bill) liberal love so much and depend on.
The state has laws regarding marriage or civil unions because there are rights accorded to spouses under the law, and have been since the country was founded. There are a huge number of these rights, far more than I had even imagined. Marriage establishes a legal kinship between people and automatically grants these rights, only some of which can be gotten through other means, and at much greater legal expense.
So, these special rights accorded to married couples by the state would either need to be done away with (which won't happen), or provided for through some other mechanism. Once you establish that other mechanism, then people will argue about whether gay couples should be allowed to avail themselves of that mechanism. As long as there are rights granted by the state for marriage or whatever form of union, there's really no non-religious reason why gay people should be prevented from forming such a union.
..for what were originally serious felonies of trying to bug a U.S. senator's office in broad daylight in New Orleans. Helped that the co-conspirator was the son of a U.S. Attorney in Louisiana, one suspects. The leader is the same creep who pretended to be a 1970s pimp in order to smear ACORN with a faked the video. Now he's getting off with a slap on the wrist for stuff the Watergate burglars went to prison for.
(They went into the Landrieu's office, in a federal building, and pretended to be a telephone repair crew. The receptionist became suspicious when they asked her where the equipment closet was.)
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/04/arraignment_set_in_sen_landrie.html
Someone's on a modding spree apparently. The parent post is certainly not off topic.
O'Keefe et al entered a US Senator's office disguised as telephone repair men to tamper with the phone system. One accomplice is the son of a US attorney in Louisiana. All 4 were arrested by the FBI. All 4 skated.
"Justice" in these cases seems to depend quite heavily on whose political party your father belongs to.
Not sure why the parent post gets modded as a troll. It's a very relevant point. Everyone seemed to be in favor of throwing the book at the guy that got into Palin's account (I can't call it hacking because it wasn't), but these guys try to tap a Senator's office phones and get off with a slap on the wrist?
If I recall, it was assumed that merely having a personal email account was a means to skirt public disclosure requirements, but after multiple ethics investigations, they didn't find anything.
So was there proof she was doing "sekrit" business in her personal email account or not?
There were two different Yahoo accounts. One was personal (gov.palin@yahoo.com) and the other was used for government business (gov.sarah@yahoo.com). There is plenty of evidence of that, including emails reminding her aides to send to the gov.sarah account instead of the official state address. She even claimed to be unaware of any state laws regarding document retention. Alaska has since passed new legislation that specifically addresses what she was doing so that there can be no way to claim that such practices do not violate document retention policies. We absolutely should be able to see what our government does in our name and why, even if we don't get to see it while it's happening. To do otherwise undermines our system of representation.
My favorite of thise is when he finds out the price of the Bushmaster ACR.
Of course you can still make the parody video you describe but you'll need to host it on your own web site. This is a much better option for you because you'll find out quickly what it is like to deal with DMCA takedown notices, and C&D letters, and the real costs of the bandwidth needed to dissimenate popular videos over the internet, and wrench the servers to do that, and so on and so forth.
That way in the future you'll pause before whining about some free service someone else provides that doesn't quite to every single thing you think it should do.
If they weren't making lots of money from it, or at least planning to, they wouldn't be offering those services. They don't do it out of the kindness of their hearts. We certainly have every right to request improvements to the site. If they want our eyeballs on their ads, then they should try to make the site the kind of place where we want to spend a fair amount of time. As for the cost of bandwidth, you can't really compare hosting something yourself to what Google does. They're in a whole different world of bandwidth costs that bear no relation at all to what you or I would pay per GB.
Oooo, counter with an ad hominem argument. Good one.
How is pointing at insects as a counter-argument considered ad hominem? The second part of his comment was not at all related to the counter-argument, as it was explicitly pointed out. Claiming that the second part of the comment was actually a counter-argument is rather dishonest, but that's not entirely unexpected from an anonymous coward.
In fact, about the only reason I can think of for an alien race to want to visit us would simply be for research and the knowledge gained. The exact same reason we visit other planets too.
There's one other reason, and it's of the long-term thinking variety. They could study us, learn whatever they can from us, and then annihilate us so that we never become a threat. It's possible that there are some galactic-scale technologies that would be the rough equivalent of nukes here on a single planet. Meaning that for the same reason we fear others developing or obtaining nukes, they would want to prevent us from ever developing technologies that could wipe out star systems, for example. We don't know what those technologies would be like or how long it would take us to get to that point, but they would have a much better idea, and every reason to make sure we never get there.
Or, rather than their technology, their natural biological capabilities. Let's say they have some method of extreme "hibernation" that can last thousands of years and a biological method to repair all the radiation damage of prolonged space travel. That's something we don't generally see in macroscopic organisms here on earth, but there's no theoretical reason it's impossible. We could get manned missions to other stars now (well we could launch them now) if we didn't need to eat or breathe and could be packed into a small box.
In that case, they'd still need technology far beyond our own, just not the same technology that we'd need to accomplish that feat.
Without the series as a primer, if you will, the movie doesn't really make that much sense.
I don't think the movie was truly intended to stand alone. It was more of a payback to fans for buying Firefly DVDs and a way to wrap up the series after Fox fucked everyone over so badly.
Slashdot Mirror
You conveniently forget that the government shall also make no law prohibiting the free expression of religion. The Constitution has balance, it's extremely well-thought-out. Your post is all one-sided, and so is the way the Constitution has been interpreted in the last few decades. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.
If you do not have freedom from religion, then you do not have freedom of religion. Without freedom from religion, it must be understood that there is some requirement that you adhere to some religion, recognized as such by the state. How can you possibly interpret that as religious freedom? The state should avoid meddling in the affairs of religion, and should take no action to endorse or support any religion, except in cases where such support is offered to any and all religions. To do otherwise is to allow the state to play favorites with religions.
Maybe you can explain to me how keeping the government separate from religion, in that it can neither promote nor endorse, nor suppress nor oppose any religion, is a bad thing? What, precisely, is the problem with that?
During the early years of Federal government, under our current Constitution and while the creators of it were still alive, States actually sponsored different denominations. That's right. There was State sponsored religion, but not Federal sponsored religion. Thomas Jefferson even started a church that met in the Capitol building that had 2,000 people attending it on a weekly basis. The founding fathers saw nothing wrong with expressing their religious beliefs wherever, and whenever, they so desired. They just recognized that it was wrong to oppress someone who disagreed with them on religious issues. At the same time they weren't going to allow anyone else to oppress them because of their beliefs.
State-sponsored churches existed in some places into the mid 1800s. They were unconstitutional, but tradition is a tough thing to overcome, so they took some time to go away. Jefferson didn't start a church either. There were services held in the capitol for those who lived and worked there.
The strange thing to me is that many of the people who came to the U.S. did so to escape religious persecution. Of course they proceeded to persecute each other when they got here anyway. Keeping the government out of it is the best way to prevent any particular sect from gaining a foothold and the ability to sway the government to support or oppose other religious groups. Funny how so many conservatives who supposedly don't trust the government not to abuse its power are so quick to try to give it domain to support their own religion, completely forgetting that that power can also be abused, and your people won't always be in control.
The "wall of separation" letter was written to a church who feared they would be oppressed by the government because they were small. His letter was in response to that. The context makes all the difference. He wasn't saying there couldn't be any religious display on public premises. He was reaffirming the idea that the government could not restrict that group's right to worship as they pleased.
You're reading a lot into that letter that wasn't actually said. He was a politician too, after all. Politicians know how to placate their constituents. He obviously didn't buy into the Christian religion, even if he thought well of some of the tenets.
If you really fail to see how that verse applies in an argument over whether Christian ethics are compatible with freedom (and by extension free enterprise), I suggest you find a class in remedial reading comprehension. If, however; you merely protest to my use of a single set of verses without the full context of scripture, I'll be happy to address the point more thoroughly.
Now if only you could get Christians to all agree on interpretations of scripture, as well as which ones are applicable, which ones take precedence over others, what caveats apply, etc. The term "Christian ethics" implies some unified set of beliefs, but Christianity is hardly unified.
>By definition a Troll is someone who makes defamatory ad hominem comments about the poster, instead of bothering to legitimately address the subject of discussion.
That would actually be a "flamer".
A troll is someone who deliberately presents a false and/or stupid opinion in order to generate a reaction in their audience.
Welcome to the internet!
Of course the troll definition actually applies better to the GP post than flamer anyway.
What? We're removing people for putting bias into textbooks now?
I'm intrigued by who you think will be left to teach after your purges have been carried out.
I study the history of history, and it's very fascinating to watch this Texas process happen. It's a reaction to a trend that's been going on since the 1960s, which has been more or less looking at history through a politically correct lens. In the 1950s, the crusades were considered a just war. Kids raised today were raised instead by a series of textbooks that portrayed them as a war of European aggression against the innocent people living in the Levant.
In honesty, the first is closer to the truth, but if you mention this to anyone raised by the modern system, they will sputter and become outraged if you claim the crusades had some justification to them. They know what they know, but they don't know what they know is wrong.
Note: I disagree with many of the Texas changes, but there is a politically correct bias in the majority of modern day historical scholarship, that I think they have a legitimate reason to respond to.
What's "politically correct" depends entirely upon your politics. This is a group of fundamentalist Christians rewriting history to agree with their politics. Even though they make up a small percentage of the country, they wield disproportionate power in Texas due to the adoption of Texas books by many other states. That they have attempted to rewrite science as well just shows that they have no regard for the facts that disagree with their mythology and worldview.
Because it didn't turn out to be relevant?
Really? Congress hands its authority off to a slew of science-technocratic authorities every day... the EPA, OSHA, etc. None of these bodies are elected, and yet they arguably have a huge and often expensive impact on our lives. They're literally the very model of a technocratic government that views "expertise" as more important than democratic self-rule.
I'd say Ike's second part was not only relevant, but turned out to be just as prophetic as the first military-industrial part.
Those authorities aren't appointed for life like USSC justices. They're appointed by the democratically elected representatives of the people to do a job that they should have an appropriate level of expertise in. We could go with a more direct democratic approach, but I don't think it would be an improvement. Just look at California's problems cause by their referendum system that allows people who don't know shit about an issue to make decisions for the state.
That's because you aren't paying for your kid's education. You are paying for a public education system. This is why non-parents also pay the same taxes. Society benefits from a public education system.
Sure, but it's still wrong to say that the schools are free.
Ok, lets say then, a "cheaper" option is public school, or that "more expensive options are available."
Roads are not free. Police are not free. Traffic lights are not free. Parks are not free. wtf cares that public education is not "free." Its an option you do not have to incur additional cost to undertake, vs the alternative "choices" you have.
Don't like the policies? Either don't go to public school, move, or get political and do something about it.
I care that it's not free, and I took issue with you saying that it was. I've been supporting the movement to get vouchers implemented in Texas, but unfortunately that hasn't happened except in limited experimental trials in certain areas. I'd rather take as much of my money as I can get back from the government and send my kids to a school where the curriculum isn't dictated by a pack of utter morons like the majority of the Texas State Board of Education. Of course I'm trying to get rid of the idiots on the board as well. Hoping that Rebecca Bell-Metereau gets elected this time around, as well as a few other sane people taking on the incumbent idiots.
Don't worry, your matters of record was only a link to wikipedia, which is only slightly worse than an incorrect opinion. You're still safe.
The link was to a summary of the case and included links to the actual court documents. You fail at reading comprehension.
Yes, so I'm paying for "free" schools, regardless of whether my kid attends them, or whether I even have kids. They certainly aren't free.
Really? Because I refuse to purchase anything on Steam.
Any service that takes away all my control of something I've "purchased" isn't something I will use. It brings the underlying problem of software "sales" to light very clearly. Somehow all these companies seem to ignore first sale doctrine and property rights by the practice of granting "licenses" on whatever unreadable terms their lawyers manage to stuff into the EULA.
If the price is low enough, I'm willing to forego first sale rights. I never sell my games anyway, so Steam and Impulse sales save me lots of money. If you do plan to resell the games, then sure, don't use Steam, but for people like me, it's a great way to get games cheaply and conveniently.
You're only reading one side of the story. Maybe this kid got warned a couple of dozen times already; maybe they sent notes home, talked to the parents, and so on.
How about a week detention for consistently breaking the rules every day since the start of the year?
The story is highly incendiary and only provides limited info. Maybe the story should read: "The little darling has been warned 287 times so far this year; she continued to sneak candy in and even got her friend to bring candy. We can't abide rule breakers like that."
Well we could make up all kinds of scenarios if that's what we want to do, but since that isn't the information we have to go on, there's really no point in it. Maybe TFA leaves things out. That wouldn't be surprising. Since we don't know though, it doesn't really make sense to just start assuming things without any basis. The missing info, if there is any, could support either side.
If you want to attend FREE school, you absolutely must abide by the state/district policies. Don't like it? You have a choice: Private school. Actually, there's another choice: Home school.
Since when is it free? They've raised our property taxes a few times now to generate more funding for the public schools in the area. They're hardly free. If I want to send my kid to private school, they don't let me opt out of paying for the public schools.
Yeah, I like those types too. I tend towards those, along with skill-based FPS games and some open-world games like Oblivion (plus lots of mods). Of course I also recently got into Just Cause 2 because it's just some ridiculous fun and I can play it for 20 or 30 minutes at a time just to take a break.
You call "arriving at correct results" "Shoddy and careless"?
What? No, that's not how it works.
Let's say I look into a crystal ball and say, "My crystal ball is round, therefore the Earth is round." Have I done anything even remotely scientific? Should anyone assign any credibility to my results?
Huh? How is using methods that aren't considered optimal by statisticians anything at all like taking a wild guess?
Or make a quality game, like Chrono Trigger. Huge world, multiple endings, long but focused storyline(s), characters progressing differently depending on who you team them up with, and a lot more that makes the game hugely replayable and enjoyable.
Chrono Trigger was a good game and had a good story, but the battle mechanics were really repetitive. That's the part that got very tiresome for me.
You do realize that decrying homosexual marriage restrictions and claiming theocracy in the same post is hypocritical right? You realize that if it wasn't for a theocracy (Christian/Rome) the state would have no interest in a ... wait for it ... SACRED institution like Marriage.
MY view is that the state should have no laws either establishing or punishing people for their "marital status". It should not care one way or another.
But that would break all sorts of "social programs" (like the new Health Care Bill) liberal love so much and depend on.
The state has laws regarding marriage or civil unions because there are rights accorded to spouses under the law, and have been since the country was founded. There are a huge number of these rights, far more than I had even imagined. Marriage establishes a legal kinship between people and automatically grants these rights, only some of which can be gotten through other means, and at much greater legal expense.
So, these special rights accorded to married couples by the state would either need to be done away with (which won't happen), or provided for through some other mechanism. Once you establish that other mechanism, then people will argue about whether gay couples should be allowed to avail themselves of that mechanism. As long as there are rights granted by the state for marriage or whatever form of union, there's really no non-religious reason why gay people should be prevented from forming such a union.
..for what were originally serious felonies of trying to bug a U.S. senator's office in broad daylight in New Orleans. Helped that the co-conspirator was the son of a U.S. Attorney in Louisiana, one suspects. The leader is the same creep who pretended to be a 1970s pimp in order to smear ACORN with a faked the video. Now he's getting off with a slap on the wrist for stuff the Watergate burglars went to prison for. (They went into the Landrieu's office, in a federal building, and pretended to be a telephone repair crew. The receptionist became suspicious when they asked her where the equipment closet was.) http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2010/04/arraignment_set_in_sen_landrie.html
Someone's on a modding spree apparently. The parent post is certainly not off topic.
while this kid will likely serve time. Yes, it's *that* O'Keefe of fake pimp ACORN "sting" infamy.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/01/fbi-arrests-james-okeefe-at-landrieus-office/34243/
O'Keefe et al entered a US Senator's office disguised as telephone repair men to tamper with the phone system. One accomplice is the son of a US attorney in Louisiana. All 4 were arrested by the FBI. All 4 skated.
"Justice" in these cases seems to depend quite heavily on whose political party your father belongs to.
Not sure why the parent post gets modded as a troll. It's a very relevant point. Everyone seemed to be in favor of throwing the book at the guy that got into Palin's account (I can't call it hacking because it wasn't), but these guys try to tap a Senator's office phones and get off with a slap on the wrist?
If I recall, it was assumed that merely having a personal email account was a means to skirt public disclosure requirements, but after multiple ethics investigations, they didn't find anything.
So was there proof she was doing "sekrit" business in her personal email account or not?
There were two different Yahoo accounts. One was personal (gov.palin@yahoo.com) and the other was used for government business (gov.sarah@yahoo.com). There is plenty of evidence of that, including emails reminding her aides to send to the gov.sarah account instead of the official state address. She even claimed to be unaware of any state laws regarding document retention. Alaska has since passed new legislation that specifically addresses what she was doing so that there can be no way to claim that such practices do not violate document retention policies. We absolutely should be able to see what our government does in our name and why, even if we don't get to see it while it's happening. To do otherwise undermines our system of representation.
My favorite of thise is when he finds out the price of the Bushmaster ACR.
Of course you can still make the parody video you describe but you'll need to host it on your own web site. This is a much better option for you because you'll find out quickly what it is like to deal with DMCA takedown notices, and C&D letters, and the real costs of the bandwidth needed to dissimenate popular videos over the internet, and wrench the servers to do that, and so on and so forth.
That way in the future you'll pause before whining about some free service someone else provides that doesn't quite to every single thing you think it should do.
If they weren't making lots of money from it, or at least planning to, they wouldn't be offering those services. They don't do it out of the kindness of their hearts. We certainly have every right to request improvements to the site. If they want our eyeballs on their ads, then they should try to make the site the kind of place where we want to spend a fair amount of time. As for the cost of bandwidth, you can't really compare hosting something yourself to what Google does. They're in a whole different world of bandwidth costs that bear no relation at all to what you or I would pay per GB.
Oooo, counter with an ad hominem argument. Good one.
How is pointing at insects as a counter-argument considered ad hominem? The second part of his comment was not at all related to the counter-argument, as it was explicitly pointed out. Claiming that the second part of the comment was actually a counter-argument is rather dishonest, but that's not entirely unexpected from an anonymous coward.
In fact, about the only reason I can think of for an alien race to want to visit us would simply be for research and the knowledge gained. The exact same reason we visit other planets too.
There's one other reason, and it's of the long-term thinking variety. They could study us, learn whatever they can from us, and then annihilate us so that we never become a threat. It's possible that there are some galactic-scale technologies that would be the rough equivalent of nukes here on a single planet. Meaning that for the same reason we fear others developing or obtaining nukes, they would want to prevent us from ever developing technologies that could wipe out star systems, for example. We don't know what those technologies would be like or how long it would take us to get to that point, but they would have a much better idea, and every reason to make sure we never get there.
Or, rather than their technology, their natural biological capabilities. Let's say they have some method of extreme "hibernation" that can last thousands of years and a biological method to repair all the radiation damage of prolonged space travel. That's something we don't generally see in macroscopic organisms here on earth, but there's no theoretical reason it's impossible. We could get manned missions to other stars now (well we could launch them now) if we didn't need to eat or breathe and could be packed into a small box.
In that case, they'd still need technology far beyond our own, just not the same technology that we'd need to accomplish that feat.
First two seasons weren't that great. It got better after that.
Without the series as a primer, if you will, the movie doesn't really make that much sense.
I don't think the movie was truly intended to stand alone. It was more of a payback to fans for buying Firefly DVDs and a way to wrap up the series after Fox fucked everyone over so badly.