Even more edge-case-y is the recent domestication of foxes: it took only a couple of generations of captive breeding for them to develop dog-like personalities, and in some cases foxes manifest dog-like personalities without any breeding at all. Little or no subjugation is occurring; the fox gets a free ride through life and the human gets a companion. Preventing this would be no different from refusing to let indigenous peoples assimilate into mainstream culture.
That's where things get really weird. The absolutism of PETA's true ideology doesn't seem to acknowledge animal intelligence or socialization; without a doubt the majority of non-stray dogs are better off emotionally and developmentally because of their owners. (For cats it's a little less certain, since they usually resist socialization with humans and are allowed to live outdoors, although my cat, like yours, has an extremely social personality.) Without question, we've improved these animals' lives.
I think the reasoning behind this little paradox, though, is aptly captured in how I phrased it originally: we have sinned by domesticating them. They've been bred into shapes and sizes desirable to us, instead of being allowed to pursue their evolution and development naturally. This is, without a doubt, the most childish misuse of conservationism, as animals influence the evolution of others around them all the time—should we blame ants for domesticating aphids? Are we on the hook for playing host to human-specific parasites?
More recently, a slightly different perspective on environmentalism has become in vogue: rather than completely insisting "we must leave the planet alone," it's now also popular to say "if we abuse the planet too much we'll die, even if we don't kill everything," which is a somewhat more pragmatic (and permissive) mindset. So not only is PETA crazy, they're out of date.
The "extra stretch" in s0nicfreak's metaphor is to incorporate the realities of what the law will look like in Texas if this passes. The DOJ (?) decided that a warrant isn't necessary to read e-mail. (Although I'm not sure if anyone can read it...)
The list is compiled according to page hit stats and reflects the last month of traffic. It's quite accurate except for the relatively small fraction of people with adblock—and do keep in mind that things may be different in different countries. Ask, for example, only gets about a quarter of its traffic from the US; it's also rather popular in Japan, India, and Mexico.
There is only one possible meaning, silly-head: there is some electronic record of the message being marked "read". (And if you didn't actually read it but it got marked read by accident, tough luck; it's not their fault the computerized equivalent of tearing open an envelope and not reading the letter only takes a bit of hesitation between two keystrokes.)
The first thing I noticed was the astonishing double standards:...
The position of those outside of PETA is not in question. PETA presents itself as an animal rights organisation and campaigns against those they believe violate animal rights, but does not actually espouse those rights itself. They mislead their followers. The postcard establishes that PETA is hypocritical to the public image they put forward; that is all. (And, for the record, we're not making a distinction between livestock and household pets—PETA's goal of "total animal liberation" includes freeing, for example, honeybees.)
Secondly, most of those images don't even have much to do with PETA at all? Thirdly, every time I read something like that it sources back to the Center for consumer freedom, or more recently, Nathan J. Winograd, who seems to be very biased for some reason.
PETA defended the actions and policies of those shelters. Mr. Winograd is a lawyer who has been hired in a few of those cases as a consultant to suggest reforms to the shelter policies (in particular Houston and King County), and found that PETA actively tried to intercede with and defeat his recommendations. Winograd is a vegan himself, and presumably finds PETA's hypocrisy intolerable.
It's no strawman—it sounds ghoulish, but it's most definitely reality, unlike their official statements. There have been several cases of PETA workers coming forward and stating that animals are killed improperly by the organization. I don't really want to spam the same link over and over (I've already posted a really disturbing photodocumentary in another comment here), but if you do a bit more research than the official statement you'll find that it's a lot of whitewashing.
The WBC is toothless in carrying out its agenda, though. PETA essentially believes in exterminating all domestic pets; that humanity has sinned by breeding them in the first place—and it does quite a lot to seek out that goal, often in an extremely and unnecessarily inhumane manner, as you might expect of the kind of people who maintain such a hostile, perverse thesis.
I always thought exploiting domain name front-running would be a clever way to have an argument—possibly with some kind of "you automatically lose the argument if the WHOIS returns a hit" rule, sort of like Godwin's Law.
Consider it a wakeup call that the electronically savvy are not necessarily the most electronically aware, I guess!
That being said, though, I think there are a few insights that can be offered: Windows Live is the default homepage on most new Windows machines, and might never be changed (an alarming number of people will readily type in "google" to Bing rather than set their homepage), and at any rate its rank would appear inflated because Google is fragmented. Twitter is probably behind LinkedIn because Alexa depends on embedded advertising js to count pagefetches, and Twitter is heavily accessed through external clients and has relatively fancy AJAX. Blogspot doesn't have as many different ccTLDs as Google itself, so many of the hits are aggregated (12.1% of all hits for Blogspot.com come from Indonesia, for example.)
Or maybe the Internet really just works that way! Hard to tell, really.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, self-constructing buildings are a reality, even without 3D printers.
Pretty much!
Even more edge-case-y is the recent domestication of foxes: it took only a couple of generations of captive breeding for them to develop dog-like personalities, and in some cases foxes manifest dog-like personalities without any breeding at all. Little or no subjugation is occurring; the fox gets a free ride through life and the human gets a companion. Preventing this would be no different from refusing to let indigenous peoples assimilate into mainstream culture.
That's where things get really weird. The absolutism of PETA's true ideology doesn't seem to acknowledge animal intelligence or socialization; without a doubt the majority of non-stray dogs are better off emotionally and developmentally because of their owners. (For cats it's a little less certain, since they usually resist socialization with humans and are allowed to live outdoors, although my cat, like yours, has an extremely social personality.) Without question, we've improved these animals' lives.
I think the reasoning behind this little paradox, though, is aptly captured in how I phrased it originally: we have sinned by domesticating them. They've been bred into shapes and sizes desirable to us, instead of being allowed to pursue their evolution and development naturally. This is, without a doubt, the most childish misuse of conservationism, as animals influence the evolution of others around them all the time—should we blame ants for domesticating aphids? Are we on the hook for playing host to human-specific parasites?
More recently, a slightly different perspective on environmentalism has become in vogue: rather than completely insisting "we must leave the planet alone," it's now also popular to say "if we abuse the planet too much we'll die, even if we don't kill everything," which is a somewhat more pragmatic (and permissive) mindset. So not only is PETA crazy, they're out of date.
The 4th generation 8 GB iPod Touch was also $229, but did have both cameras. They weren't as high-quality as their iPhone counterparts, but still.
(Probably worth noting that Tumblr also has Formspring-style questions these days.)
By "improperly" I meant "on the spot," which is PETA's policy. They don't bother with attempting adoption.
The "extra stretch" in s0nicfreak's metaphor is to incorporate the realities of what the law will look like in Texas if this passes. The DOJ (?) decided that a warrant isn't necessary to read e-mail. (Although I'm not sure if anyone can read it...)
The list is compiled according to page hit stats and reflects the last month of traffic. It's quite accurate except for the relatively small fraction of people with adblock—and do keep in mind that things may be different in different countries. Ask, for example, only gets about a quarter of its traffic from the US; it's also rather popular in Japan, India, and Mexico.
There is only one possible meaning, silly-head: there is some electronic record of the message being marked "read". (And if you didn't actually read it but it got marked read by accident, tough luck; it's not their fault the computerized equivalent of tearing open an envelope and not reading the letter only takes a bit of hesitation between two keystrokes.)
But it's in perl! You might summon Cthulhu. Do you really want that on your conscience?
I swear I'm not—this is entirely about how to spell Stirstrap at this point. really, denmark, what were you thinking
Technically, it's cheating; all of the bloat you'd get in such a history can be imported from existing C and C++ libraries.
What, you'd rather write code like in your sig?
Whaddaya mean? Stroostrip's fine!
This?
The first thing I noticed was the astonishing double standards: ...
The position of those outside of PETA is not in question. PETA presents itself as an animal rights organisation and campaigns against those they believe violate animal rights, but does not actually espouse those rights itself. They mislead their followers. The postcard establishes that PETA is hypocritical to the public image they put forward; that is all. (And, for the record, we're not making a distinction between livestock and household pets—PETA's goal of "total animal liberation" includes freeing, for example, honeybees.)
Secondly, most of those images don't even have much to do with PETA at all? Thirdly, every time I read something like that it sources back to the Center for consumer freedom, or more recently, Nathan J. Winograd, who seems to be very biased for some reason.
PETA defended the actions and policies of those shelters. Mr. Winograd is a lawyer who has been hired in a few of those cases as a consultant to suggest reforms to the shelter policies (in particular Houston and King County), and found that PETA actively tried to intercede with and defeat his recommendations. Winograd is a vegan himself, and presumably finds PETA's hypocrisy intolerable.
It's no strawman—it sounds ghoulish, but it's most definitely reality, unlike their official statements. There have been several cases of PETA workers coming forward and stating that animals are killed improperly by the organization. I don't really want to spam the same link over and over (I've already posted a really disturbing photodocumentary in another comment here), but if you do a bit more research than the official statement you'll find that it's a lot of whitewashing.
No doubt so shall we all.
It's actually a lot worse, and I say this as someone with no love for gun rights. You'll need a strong stomach for the reason why, though. (I mean it.)
The WBC is toothless in carrying out its agenda, though. PETA essentially believes in exterminating all domestic pets; that humanity has sinned by breeding them in the first place—and it does quite a lot to seek out that goal, often in an extremely and unnecessarily inhumane manner, as you might expect of the kind of people who maintain such a hostile, perverse thesis.
Andy <- Andrew <- Andros = "man". Yes, I can see how that would be problematic.
The distinct bouquet of "publicly displayed corpse" was a household fixture in pre-Renaissance Europe. I'm sure it would've been missed.
I always thought exploiting domain name front-running would be a clever way to have an argument—possibly with some kind of "you automatically lose the argument if the WHOIS returns a hit" rule, sort of like Godwin's Law.
WhatDoYouWant.com?
ImJustSayingItsNotFairThatsAll.com
NobodyWantsToGoThereWithYou.com
GoWhere.com?
*bzzt*
Consider it a wakeup call that the electronically savvy are not necessarily the most electronically aware, I guess!
That being said, though, I think there are a few insights that can be offered: Windows Live is the default homepage on most new Windows machines, and might never be changed (an alarming number of people will readily type in "google" to Bing rather than set their homepage), and at any rate its rank would appear inflated because Google is fragmented. Twitter is probably behind LinkedIn because Alexa depends on embedded advertising js to count pagefetches, and Twitter is heavily accessed through external clients and has relatively fancy AJAX. Blogspot doesn't have as many different ccTLDs as Google itself, so many of the hits are aggregated (12.1% of all hits for Blogspot.com come from Indonesia, for example.)
Or maybe the Internet really just works that way! Hard to tell, really.