> Ok, for the moment, let's say we leave God out. If sin is a "void concept" to you, how do you explain the universal phenomenon of people acting in ways destructive to themselves and others?
People act in ways destructive to themselves and others because they either a) don't stop to consider the consequences of their actions, or b) are aware of those consequences and just don't care at that particular moment, or at all.
Now what does any of this have to do with the concept of 'sin'? In all religions I'm aware of, the list of 'sins' is a wild mixture of genuinely damaging behaviours and completely arbitrary taboos.
Could it be that people such as you describe do exist, but discovered there's no money to be made on the home desktop, and specialized on selling to the enterprise?
Hey, so getting on an adult's nerves should also be a crime if said adult is mentally unstable? That _really_ opens the floodgates, given that 'mentally unstable' is about as imprecise a term as it gets.
If the adult in question is a public official, not hard to think of examples at all, where you keep criticising how they do their job and they take it personally.
Not that I think there should be a law against the original Megan Meier situation either, but I can see how people could disagree there - but this seems a pretty clearcut bad idea.
Nobody forces me to listen to Beyonce and her ilk, and indeed I don't. But why should I bow to the whim of some exec somewhere as to under what conditions I'm allowed to listen to, say, Elvis?
If anyone deserves to be public domain, the King certainly does;)
But of course there is a difference. 'the most important woman in the subject's life' expression hides the crucial difference in power relations.
One's partner is 'the most important woman in one's life' by choice, one's mother not. One's partner has exactly as much power over you as you agree to give her, one's mother (when one is a child) has quite a lot of power regardless. And when the latter power is abused, it is in my opinion entirely fair game to defend oneself with the means at one's disposal, and yes that includes lies if more savory means are exhausted. If one's mother thinks all computer games are evil for example, yes I think it's entirely justified to mislead her as to what exactly one was doing when visiting a friend.
Not all mothers are control freaks, but enough of those I've met are, to make your simile silly.
Bad, bad idea. Marriage implies not just rights but _obligations_ - the whole 'till death do us part' thing. Do you want those to apply to any cohabiting couple? I sure don't.
Much better to keep it like now, where a couple must register to have them apply, also known as 'marriage'. What gender, if any, the couple members are is up to them - I'd advocate to allow marriages with more than 2 members, too, were it not for the fact that most marriage-related law would have to be heavily amended then.
What is 'society' and who gets to define what benefits it (and in your reasoning, to decide what coercion and deprivation of rights is justified)?
I would say that no one should be in a position to prohibit behaviors unless they are, or could be, overtly harmed by those. And no, knowing that some gay couples somewhere are enjoying the same rights that straight couples take for granted does NOT qualify as 'being overtly harmed'.
Equality of people before the law, in particular with respect to their gender, seems to me a good place to start - and if so, the burden of proof is on you to show that gay marriage is in some way harmful to 'society', whatever that is.
Are you catholic?
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You shed god knows how many skin cells every day, how is _that_ different? Or do you believe contraception is murder because a sperm inside an egg cell is somehow a human being?
Once a baby is actually _born_, I consider it a human being (though even then, Peter Singer makes a good argument that it's not really until it's self-aware, which is a couple of months later). Until birth, it's either a part of the mother's anatomy to do what she feels like (if it's implanted in the womb already) or just a thing in a glass if it's not.
Funny how you assume everybody has the same ethical principles as you and any genuine differences are merely 'rationalization of what they know is wrong' on their part.
Some people just honestly believe that while sane copyright laws would be best (5, at most 10 years protection and no criminal penalties ever, to begin with), no copyright at all would lead to a better world than the one we're living in right now.
Nope, all he implied was that there might well be a similar _share_ of qualified applicants among Amerincans. Most applicants in any given pool are useless, and it's impossible to interview everybody. So if (simplifying here) all US resumes are crap, there is no realistic way to find out which of the 100s of applicants are worth interviewing; in other words, the probability that the couple dozen you'll have come in will be crap are very high, and therefore it's not cost-effective to consider them at all, with more informative Indian CVs allowing for a higher signal-to-noise ratio of initial selection.
I would disagree, in that mediocrity is an incurable personality trait that cannot be remedied by any amount of on-the-job training. People who are not actually stupid but not really bright either, will in my experience remain so no matter what you do to them (well, certainly after 25 or so - who knows how much they owe their mediocrity to a bad education system).
Note that I am not making any statement about relative density of mediocre people among citizens vs. H1Bs (I've met plenty of either).
Sorry, missed the specific exlusion of water in the last quote - still, sounds fishy to me. Is it proven that if I drink a diet coke, substantial gastric acid is released?
Thanks for the citation, but I'm afraid that article is crap.
> But why would diet soda make some people gain weight? There are only theories at this point but it may be as simple as people consciously eating more because they think they can.
Has nothing to do whatsoever with how harmful or not the actual drinks are.
> And of course, it's all just a theory until larger controlled studies can be done, but the early findings are fascinating.
If the article was about, say, harmfulness of video games, I suspect you'd be among the ones laughing your ass off at the sloppy standards of proof.
> When I put anything to my stomach that's not water then my stomach responds by increasing the gastric acid secretion," Fowler says. "Does that increase my sense of hunger and does that drive me to eat more?"
By that same reasoning, drinking couple of liters of pure water per day would make you gain weight, is that your opinion too?
'no nutritional value' is why they're called diet sodas. 'Chemical soup' is a semantically empty phrase - everything you eat and drink is made out of 'chemicals'.
> diet soft drinks can trick your body into performing the exact same insulin spike, still contributing to obesity.
citation needed, likewise on the harmful effects of the phosphoric acid
Not saying you're wrong, just that you've failed to make a convincing argument so far
A very reasonable post, right until you made the leap of faith about diet sodas being bad. Your whole previous post was about sugar content, so how does that reasoning go?
If it went on for decades, with the Iraqi army having only mortars and homemade explosives, at that point it would be. Thankfully Bush senior knew when to stop and get out.
The licensing costs of Excel are simply not an issue in financial companies (a vanishing fraction of what it costs to keep the desk operating); also, we don't use any of the fancier functionality of Excel - any fancy stuff traders need, such as solvers, option pricers, etc is written in C++ and made available as an Excel plugin. So Excel is merely used as a GUI framework with mild number-crunching support, and it's really great for that. Switching would simply mean redoing all of the C++-to-plugin code, for no benefit that I can see.
Nobody in finance uses Excel for research - it's all Matlab or R, with some C++ thrown in.
Can you give me a single reason *why* finance folks (of which I am one) should switch away from Excel?
"Just about any nation", hardly. Some, sure. For example, South Africa faced up to the grievous injustices that have been done under apartheid, and so they now have a nation that's not without problems (who is?) but basically at peace. Before that happened, Mandela was also labeled a 'terrorist' by SA and US govts.
Most other nations with skeletons in the cupboard persist in denial, just like Israel does, and continue the cycle of bloodshed. As long as the other side is regarded as 'terrorist scum', the killing will go on.
No, I believe that Israel should recognize that grievous injustices towards Palestinians were committed when the state was founded, and ever since; withdraw every single settler and soldier from the West Bank, offer citizenship and substantial reparations to the current inhabitants of Palestine, and recognize that Israel has no more inherent 'right to exist' than any other state does.
That would not quite atone for all the killing Israel is guilty of, but would create something resembling a starting point for a peace process.
> When someone is trying to kill you, then you you have the right to employ whatever amount of force is necessary to stop it.
It's funny how you apply this to one side only in the conflict, isn't it?
Troll? Sorry, that view of Israel is held by a LOT of people outside the US and Israel (and not just Muslims either), and is certainly not less reasonable than the official US stance over Iraq.
Slashdot Mirror
> Ok, for the moment, let's say we leave God out. If sin is a "void concept" to you, how do you explain the universal phenomenon of people acting in ways destructive to themselves and others?
People act in ways destructive to themselves and others because they either a) don't stop to consider the consequences of their actions, or b) are aware of those consequences and just don't care at that particular moment, or at all.
Now what does any of this have to do with the concept of 'sin'? In all religions I'm aware of, the list of 'sins' is a wild mixture of genuinely damaging behaviours and completely arbitrary taboos.
So you oppose anonymity in all its forms? Tor, TrueCrypt, Freenet are all solving the wrong problem?
And while we're at it, could I please have your true name and bank account details, please?
Or an interesting sense of humor.
Could it be that people such as you describe do exist, but discovered there's no money to be made on the home desktop, and specialized on selling to the enterprise?
Hey, so getting on an adult's nerves should also be a crime if said adult is mentally unstable? That _really_ opens the floodgates, given that 'mentally unstable' is about as imprecise a term as it gets.
If the adult in question is a public official, not hard to think of examples at all, where you keep criticising how they do their job and they take it personally.
Not that I think there should be a law against the original Megan Meier situation either, but I can see how people could disagree there - but this seems a pretty clearcut bad idea.
just because the law is fucked up?
Nobody forces me to listen to Beyonce and her ilk, and indeed I don't. But why should I bow to the whim of some exec somewhere as to under what conditions I'm allowed to listen to, say, Elvis?
If anyone deserves to be public domain, the King certainly does;)
But of course there is a difference. 'the most important woman in the subject's life' expression hides the crucial difference in power relations.
One's partner is 'the most important woman in one's life' by choice, one's mother not. One's partner has exactly as much power over you as you agree to give her, one's mother (when one is a child) has quite a lot of power regardless. And when the latter power is abused, it is in my opinion entirely fair game to defend oneself with the means at one's disposal, and yes that includes lies if more savory means are exhausted. If one's mother thinks all computer games are evil for example, yes I think it's entirely justified to mislead her as to what exactly one was doing when visiting a friend.
Not all mothers are control freaks, but enough of those I've met are, to make your simile silly.
Bad, bad idea. Marriage implies not just rights but _obligations_ - the whole 'till death do us part' thing. Do you want those to apply to any cohabiting couple? I sure don't.
Much better to keep it like now, where a couple must register to have them apply, also known as 'marriage'. What gender, if any, the couple members are is up to them - I'd advocate to allow marriages with more than 2 members, too, were it not for the fact that most marriage-related law would have to be heavily amended then.
What is 'society' and who gets to define what benefits it (and in your reasoning, to decide what coercion and deprivation of rights is justified)?
I would say that no one should be in a position to prohibit behaviors unless they are, or could be, overtly harmed by those. And no, knowing that some gay couples somewhere are enjoying the same rights that straight couples take for granted does NOT qualify as 'being overtly harmed'.
Equality of people before the law, in particular with respect to their gender, seems to me a good place to start - and if so, the burden of proof is on you to show that gay marriage is in some way harmful to 'society', whatever that is.
You shed god knows how many skin cells every day, how is _that_ different? Or do you believe contraception is murder because a sperm inside an egg cell is somehow a human being?
Once a baby is actually _born_, I consider it a human being (though even then, Peter Singer makes a good argument that it's not really until it's self-aware, which is a couple of months later). Until birth, it's either a part of the mother's anatomy to do what she feels like (if it's implanted in the womb already) or just a thing in a glass if it's not.
Funny how you assume everybody has the same ethical principles as you and any genuine differences are merely 'rationalization of what they know is wrong' on their part.
Some people just honestly believe that while sane copyright laws would be best (5, at most 10 years protection and no criminal penalties ever, to begin with), no copyright at all would lead to a better world than the one we're living in right now.
Nope, all he implied was that there might well be a similar _share_ of qualified applicants among Amerincans. Most applicants in any given pool are useless, and it's impossible to interview everybody. So if (simplifying here) all US resumes are crap, there is no realistic way to find out which of the 100s of applicants are worth interviewing; in other words, the probability that the couple dozen you'll have come in will be crap are very high, and therefore it's not cost-effective to consider them at all, with more informative Indian CVs allowing for a higher signal-to-noise ratio of initial selection.
I would disagree, in that mediocrity is an incurable personality trait that cannot be remedied by any amount of on-the-job training. People who are not actually stupid but not really bright either, will in my experience remain so no matter what you do to them (well, certainly after 25 or so - who knows how much they owe their mediocrity to a bad education system).
Note that I am not making any statement about relative density of mediocre people among citizens vs. H1Bs (I've met plenty of either).
Sorry, missed the specific exlusion of water in the last quote - still, sounds fishy to me. Is it proven that if I drink a diet coke, substantial gastric acid is released?
Thanks for the citation, but I'm afraid that article is crap.
> But why would diet soda make some people gain weight? There are only theories at this point but it may be as simple as people consciously eating more because they think they can.
Has nothing to do whatsoever with how harmful or not the actual drinks are.
> And of course, it's all just a theory until larger controlled studies can be done, but the early findings are fascinating.
If the article was about, say, harmfulness of video games, I suspect you'd be among the ones laughing your ass off at the sloppy standards of proof.
> When I put anything to my stomach that's not water then my stomach responds by increasing the gastric acid secretion," Fowler says. "Does that increase my sense of hunger and does that drive me to eat more?"
By that same reasoning, drinking couple of liters of pure water per day would make you gain weight, is that your opinion too?
'no nutritional value' is why they're called diet sodas. 'Chemical soup' is a semantically empty phrase - everything you eat and drink is made out of 'chemicals'.
> diet soft drinks can trick your body into performing the exact same insulin spike, still contributing to obesity.
citation needed, likewise on the harmful effects of the phosphoric acid
Not saying you're wrong, just that you've failed to make a convincing argument so far
A very reasonable post, right until you made the leap of faith about diet sodas being bad. Your whole previous post was about sugar content, so how does that reasoning go?
If it went on for decades, with the Iraqi army having only mortars and homemade explosives, at that point it would be. Thankfully Bush senior knew when to stop and get out.
Ah, so can your ANYTHING_ELSE do a quick join on two rectangular areas in the spreadsheet, and dump the result into the spreadsheet?
How good is ANYTHING_ELSE's pivot table support?
And no, I don't want to have to mess around with a full relational DB to get the above done when it's just a couple of clicks in Excel.
The licensing costs of Excel are simply not an issue in financial companies (a vanishing fraction of what it costs to keep the desk operating); also, we don't use any of the fancier functionality of Excel - any fancy stuff traders need, such as solvers, option pricers, etc is written in C++ and made available as an Excel plugin. So Excel is merely used as a GUI framework with mild number-crunching support, and it's really great for that. Switching would simply mean redoing all of the C++-to-plugin code, for no benefit that I can see.
Nobody in finance uses Excel for research - it's all Matlab or R, with some C++ thrown in.
Can you give me a single reason *why* finance folks (of which I am one) should switch away from Excel?
"Just about any nation", hardly. Some, sure. For example, South Africa faced up to the grievous injustices that have been done under apartheid, and so they now have a nation that's not without problems (who is?) but basically at peace. Before that happened, Mandela was also labeled a 'terrorist' by SA and US govts.
Most other nations with skeletons in the cupboard persist in denial, just like Israel does, and continue the cycle of bloodshed. As long as the other side is regarded as 'terrorist scum', the killing will go on.
No, I believe that Israel should recognize that grievous injustices towards Palestinians were committed when the state was founded, and ever since; withdraw every single settler and soldier from the West Bank, offer citizenship and substantial reparations to the current inhabitants of Palestine, and recognize that Israel has no more inherent 'right to exist' than any other state does.
That would not quite atone for all the killing Israel is guilty of, but would create something resembling a starting point for a peace process.
> When someone is trying to kill you, then you you have the right to employ whatever amount of force is necessary to stop it.
It's funny how you apply this to one side only in the conflict, isn't it?
As far as I can judge, "World opinion" outside of the US is already pretty much pro-Palestine - at least certainly NOT overwhelmingly pro-Israel.
If you and most people you know had someone close to them murdered by the Israeli army, I suspect you'd find it hard to think about non-violence.
Not true, see for example this argument: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4111684,00.html
Troll? Sorry, that view of Israel is held by a LOT of people outside the US and Israel (and not just Muslims either), and is certainly not less reasonable than the official US stance over Iraq.
Will I be modded troll too now? OK, go ahead.