from what I've heard, the whole thing started with a heated exchange over 3rd Edition vs. 2nd
Heretics. There is only one true AD&D, and that is First Edition. It all started going downhill when they started printing the books with those nasty orange spines.
For a society to survive it is necessary for it to have its cultural, social, and moral structure passed on to future generations.
Marriage is a legal construct to make having and raising children easier and more attractive economically due to tax breaks and other legal bonuses.
Thus marriages should only be granted to couples who are theoretically capable of producing offspring without undue expense.
Your conclusion is a non sequitor -- it does not logically follow from your premises.
To trivially refute your argument, let me give you a few examples from my own life:
My brother-in-law and his wife tried for 3 years to get pregnant without any success. It cost them over $25,000 out-of-pocket in fertility treatments for her to eventually have my niece and nephew (twins). I think $25K is "undue expense", so by your standards their marriage should not have been granted.
My wife and my best friends are a lesbian couple (who have been together longer than we have, BTW). A while back they discussed having a child together and asked if I would be willing to provide the missing element via the traditional method. The only exceptional monetary expense involved would have been some legal papers -- maybe $500. No undue expense involved, so by your standard, they should be granted a legal marriage.
My aunt and uncle were medically unable to have children, so they adopted. Even 40 years ago, I'm sure it wasn't cheap. That's an undue expense, so their marriage is verboten in ikkonoishi-land.
My parents' best friends have been married for longer than I've been alive. She's unable to have kids, and they chose not to adopt. They're not theoretically capable of producing offspring, so I guess it's manditory divorce time for them too.
If the sole purpose of marriage is to facilitate child-rearing, the logical conclusion would be to only grant a marriage license to pregnant women, presumably after a paternity test proving that her prospective husband is actually the biological father of the child.
I said: Arguments based on logical fallacies are entirely without merit.
You said: that is a straw man fallacy.
Sorry, you're wrong. Do not pass the podium, do not collect your diploma.
An argument with a logical fallacy is invalid for exactly the same reason that a mathematical statement with an arithmatic mistake is invalid. They're invalid because they have errors.
Pointing out that 2+2=5 is false is not a straw man, ad hominem or any other kind of logical fallacy -- it's a statement of mathematical truth.
I believe that the process of turning a child into a human being requires close and continuous contact with 'parents' of both genders.
The evidence in the real world does not support your belief. There are millions of severely disfunctional children who were raised in traditional two-parent households, and millions of well-adjusted children who come from single-parent homes or who were raised by same-sex couples or other untraditional families.
You designate "appealing to authority" as fallacious. This is an alias for "appealing to misleading authority."
Theological arguments aside, the Christian Bible IS a misleading authority when applied legal argments in the US. The law of the land is based on the Constitution of the United States, not the Bible. This country is most emphatically NOT a theocracy.
The issue at hand is whether or not the Constitution's guarantees of equal protection under the law (14th amendment) and free practice of religion (1st amendment), are being violated by refusing to grant legal recognition to the enduring relationships maintained by one segment of the population. All you accomplish by bringing the Bible into the argument is acknowledge that the prohibition of all marriages other than Christian ones is an establishment of religion, and is therefore explicitly unconstitutional. Invoking religion automatically invalidates your argument from a Constitutional perspective.
The legitimate authorities on Constitutional law are the Constitution and it's amendments, the Federalist Papers, and Supreme Court rulings. Other writings of the framers of the Constitution (such as the private papers of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Hamilton; as well as preceding documents (such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence) are legitimate authorities in the specific instances where they illuminate the mindset and intentions of the Constitution's authors.
The only legitimate place where the Bible can enter a Constitutional law debate at all is in the instances where the Founding Fathers cite it as inspiration; however, all this does is place the Bible on equal footing with other inspriational sources, the most important of these being the writings of Enlightement philosophers such as Hobbes, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
I'd remind you that when the Framers mentioned "God", they were not talking about the God modern fundimentalist Christians worship. The architects of the Constitution were predominantly Deists and Enlightenment scholars, not Christians as a modern Fundimentalist would define it. Their God was "nature's God" (as Jefferson puts it in the Declaration of Independence); this God was viewed a celestial clockmaker who created the Universe and set it in motion, and did not interfere in it's operation thereafter. When they spoke of the "laws of God", they were talking about the laws of Science and Reason as they understood them, not a
mass of primitive superstituious gobbledegook.
To dissect your claim that the Christian Bible is a legitimate authority in the Gay Marriage debate:
Is this a matter which I can decide without appeal to expert opinion? If the answer is "yes", then do so. If "no", go to the next question:
Moral issues are not easily decided given the limits of human understanding, so an appeal to authority is useful
Two probems here. First, this is a CONSTITUTIONAL LAW issue, not a MORAL issue. Second, even if it were a moral issue, moral issues ARE easily within the limits of human understanding.
The universal, rational basis of moral behavior is exceedingly simple: do no unnecessary harm to others. Everything else derives from this simple concept. Judeism and Christianity acknowledge this, in a roundabout way (the 10 commandments are mostly just a list of specific ways of harming others, and the Sermon at the Mount Jesus says the s
I think having guns around is scary because I don't want small lumps of hot metal to rip through my organs at barely subsonic speeds. Your reason is?
I don't particuarly want lumps of hot metal ripping through my organs either. Nor do I want some steroid-pumped gorilla bashing me over a head with a big stick, or some crazed religious fanatic slicing open my juglar with a boxcutter or scattering me over several acres with a car bomb.
There are bad people in the world, and they will obtain weapons of some description no matter what precautions you take. We can't even completely disarm the inmates of maximum security prisons effectively, what makes you think that we can disarm an entire free society?
Even if you could magically destroy every firearm on the planet overnight and prevent any new ones from ever being created, you would still have violent criminals in the world, and they would still prey on those weaker and less well-armed then themselves. People were killing, raping, and robbing each other long before firearms were ever created.
In a world without firearms, people who are larger, stronger, and are more skilled at physical violence have free reign to prey on those smaller, weaker, and less skilled than themselves. The only way a 4'11", 98lb woman can effectively defend herself against a 6'3" 250lb attacker is with a firearm.
While I happen to think that government has no business prohibiting families made up of same-sex couples (or even multiple-partner marriages), there are those who strongly feel otherwise, and not simply for reasons of puritan bigotry.
Really? I personally haven't heard any arguments against gay/poly marriages that were not rooted in ignorance, bigotry, or both. Every argument I've heard effectively boils down to one of the following:
It shouldn't be allowed because it goes against long-standing societal traditions (Fallacy: Appeal to Tradition)
It's a gay/liberal/$BUGBEAR conspiricy to undermine "traditional family values" (Fallacy: Appeal to Hatred
Their objections are not entirely without merit.
I disagree. Arguments based on logical fallacies are entirely without merit.
There may be a well-reasoned, logical argment supporting the view that the state has a compelling interest to grant special legal benefits to people who are in one class of binding long-term relationships while denying those benefits to all other classes of long-term binding relationships, but I have yet to hear one.
How is this any more unconstitutioanl than the rating system on movies?
Movie ratings are voluntary and are issued by a private organization, not any branch of the government. If the government were doing it or mandating that it be done, it would be unconstitutional.
Without even getting into the free speech issues involved, this law has serious Constitutional problems.
First off, there's the commerce clause. Only Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce, the states are denied this power under the tenth amendment. About the only thing which MIGHT pass Constitutional muster are ISPs who only have customers in Utah. The only websites that could be put on the list would be those that are hosted in Utah, run by Utah-based companies, and have no customers outside of Utah.
Secondly, there's the matter of due process. One could argue that being put on the list deprives you of your liberty to conduct lawful business and unfairly stigmitizes you. Some faceless beaurocrat blacklisting you and forcing you to go through an appeals process to prove that you are not guilty is antithetical to the concept of due process.
Also note how people following the science route cannot agree on anything
Bullshit. It's only on the cutting edge of science where there's significant disagreement. There's a HUGE mass of scientific theory and physical laws which are univerally accepted: Newton's laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, the various laws and theories regarding optics, electricity, fluid dynamics, and so forth.
Why is it a religious issue to not want your children to see something like that old slashdot favorite image with "goat" in the name?
It's my job as a parent to determine what I want my kids to see on the computer. It's not the government's job to make a list of what's not OK for my kids to look at. The government has no Constitutional authority to maintain such a list nor to mandate it's use. The courts have consistantly ruled that this kind of censorship is unconstitutional.
Personally, I'd rather have my kids see Bob Goatse in all his glory than have them stumble across this poisonous filth accidentially. Somehow I doubt the things I think are offensive will find their way on to the list.
One flaw with our system of government is that politicians are not punished for intentionally passing legislation they know to be unconstitutional. Politicians who sponsor, vote for, or enact unconstitutional laws should be held criminally liable for their malfeasance.
Virtually every elected official in the country has sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. By willfully violating this oath they should by rights forfeit their office.
It's my opinon that promoting and lobbying for blatantly unconstituional laws constitutes seditious conspiricy under US law. IMHO The governer of Utah should be arrested, stripped of power, and sent to Federal PMITA prison for 20 years.
Yeah, because re-encoding a 128Kbps AAC file over analog is going to really sound great!
In my experience, it won't sound noticably worse than source file. It's not like a 128Kbps AAC file sounds that great to begin with. A miniscule degredation of already crappy audio isn't that big of a deal.
Doing the D-A-D conversion is a last resort, but it's 100% guaranteed to work. As long as your analog signal path is clean, any noise introduced will be below the threshold of what an ordinary human can detect. If you have shitty hardware, of course it's going to affect the quality, but that's not a problem with the process, it's a problem with your hardware.
Likewise, in my experience, there is no appreciable quality loss when reencoding from one lossy format to another, as long as the destination codec is at the same or higher bitrate as the original. A professional sound engineer or serious audiophile might be able to tell the difference, but it's pretty likely you won't, particuarly if you're listening to it on a portable device. Someone who is a serious audiophile probably wouldn't have his music collection encoded in a 128Kbps lossy codec in the first place.
Lets say they update the itms and/or ipod firmware to only play songs encoded with the "new" codec, where does that leave you?
Easy -- you connect the headphone jack on your iPod to the line in jack on your sound card and pipe the stream to a FLAC file. Goodbye, DRM.
Unless you have an absolute POS sound card, any loss of fidelity due to the digital - analog - digital round trip will be undetectable to the human ear, particuarly if the original digital source was encoded with a lossy codec.
Well, I finally figured it out -- even though the command line worker programs (/usr/bin/cdrecord and/usr/bin/cdrdao) are install suid root, for some reason k3b still barfs unless it is run as root.
I find this odd considering that k3b is just supposed to be a front-end for the command line tools.
This is Steve Jobs, though. He can probably get Xserves for Pixar at cost from Apple.
Then he'd be stealing from one set of stockholders to pad the pockets of another set.
Not necessarily. I can think of lots of scenerios where shuch a deal would be ethical and in the stockholder's best interest:
Apple has excess inventory that isn't moving fast enough. Selling it at cost (or even at a loss) lets them put that money into something that IS moving.
Advertising value. Apple gets to use Pixar as a showcase of what their hardware can do.
Cross-promotion/licensing. In exchange for providing discounted hardware, Apple gets mentioned in the credits, product placements, etc; and gets cheap/free licences to make tie-in products.
There's a lot of ways of getting compensation other than cash.
Re:Treating employees like human beings?
on
Inside Look at Pixar HQ
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Most of us are human beings, each with the same built in potential
Nice pep talk, but it's bullshit. Different people have different levels of potential. It takes more than dedication and hard work to excel in a given field -- it takes natural ability, which is not distributed equally.
I'm a decent engineer; if I was sufficiently motivated I could possibly be a great one. But I could never, no matter how hard I tried, become a professional baseball player, because I just don't have the natural ability in that area. Conversely, I seriously doubt that the average major-league baseball player has the aptitude to become an engineer.
Beside the incrementalist gay agenda of making the 'lifestyle choice' more acceptable to the masses
Stop getting all your "news" from Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh.
The gay marriage issue is about the seperation of Church and State, pure and simple. You have one group of people who want to use the power of government impose THEIR ideology on everyone else, and you have another group who are sick and fucking tired of having someone else's religion forced down their throat every time they turn around.
If Bob and Neil want to marry each other, how the FUCK does that "dilute" my marriage? It doesn't make me love my wife any less, or her love me any less, or interfere in any way with us raising our children.
Part of the problem that you narrow-minded nitwits can't get through your thick skulls is that the word "marriage" has two completely distinct meanings. There is the religious sacrement of marriage, which is whatever your religion of choice says it is; and there is the secular and legal institution of marriage which recognizes that a permenent bond exists between two people.
No one is saying that your CHURCH has to marry gay couples -- that would be an unconstitutional limit on your free practice of religion. If your church only wants to perform marriages between people of the same race and opposite genders, so be it. What happens behind the doors of your church is your business; what happens behind the doors of other peoples' bedrooms is theirs.
What they are saying is that ALL couples in binding relationships are entitled to equal protection under the law, as guaranteed by the Constitution, regardless of whether the gender of the participants. Get it?
You're like one of those Tolkien nerds who rants on and on about how the Lord of the Rings films are not true to the books.
If you are going to do a theatrical adaptation of a book, you should either BE FAITHFUL TO THE BOOK or call it something else. If you don't like the book the way the book is written, write your own damn story.
So many "adaptations" of books these days are just blatant attempts to cash in on name recognition of a popular author.
Jackson's adaptation of LoTR is particuarly frustrating to fans of the books, as he made such a big deal of how faithful he was going to be to the books when he started the project. When they hit the screen we found that he STILL wound up pulling a bunch of completely inauthentic scenes out off his ass and managed to completely screw up a number of key plot points for no good reason. It wouldn't have been so offensive if he hadn't lied to the fans from the start.
Even if you have the BOFH, you can more than likely work around it. No games in/usr/bin, and you don't have permission to install any? No problem -- install them in ~/bin instead. If you're really clever you can do something like "mv ~/bin/tuxracer ~/bin/tps_report" as a little misdirection.
Of course a real BOFH would mount/home with noexec... of course that would make it difficult to do any productive work either, but at least you wouldn't be playing games!
How is "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" not different from having a law against murder yet having capital punishment?
How is capital punishment justifiable if one believes that "Thou shalt not kill" is an absolute Commandment from God against killing people? You can't have it both way -- logically either the translation of the 10 Commandments is wrong, or the passages which define capital crimes (witchcraft, homosexualty, etc) are incorrect.
The doctrine of Biblical Literalism rampant among fundimentalists declares that ALL of the Bible is the 100% correct and accurate Word of God, without any possiblity of error or mistranslation. Therefore, literalist Fundimentalists have to resolve these glaringly obvious contridictions with doubletalk and wishful thinking in order to maintain their irrational and historicly inaccurate belief in an an exact literal interpretation of the Bible.
Just so you know, the original Hebrew text of the bible should NOT be translated as "Thou shalt not kill" but rather "Thou shalt not murder".
As long as we're pointing out mistakes in translation, I'd remind you that the Hebrew word for "witch" is the same as the word for "poisoner", so a more accurate translation of Exodus 22:18 would be "thou shall not suffer a poisoner to live".
This is the crux of the problem -- fundimentalist doctrine holds that the Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God, and the King James Bible is [a|the only] divinely inspired translation thereof. This belief dictates that the Bible is ALWAYS right, and it CANNOT have any errors in translation.
According to this doctrine, God was holding the translator's hand when he translated the Hebrew text as "thou shall not kill" instead of "thou shall not commit murder", so that translatation MUST, by their own definition, be *exactly* what God wanted it to be. Any real-world evidence which contridicts this belief needs to be discredited, supressed, ignored, or explained away with convoluted logic.
"thou shalt not suffer a witch to live", while not a commandment, is still a direct quote from the Old Testament (Exodus 22:18). Since fundimentalist Christian doctrine holds that the King James Bible is a divinely-inspired translation of "the literal and inerrant Word of God", they still treat this as being one of God's instructions to them.
Slashdot Mirror
To trivially refute your argument, let me give you a few examples from my own life:
My brother-in-law and his wife tried for 3 years to get pregnant without any success. It cost them over $25,000 out-of-pocket in fertility treatments for her to eventually have my niece and nephew (twins). I think $25K is "undue expense", so by your standards their marriage should not have been granted.
My wife and my best friends are a lesbian couple (who have been together longer than we have, BTW). A while back they discussed having a child together and asked if I would be willing to provide the missing element via the traditional method. The only exceptional monetary expense involved would have been some legal papers -- maybe $500. No undue expense involved, so by your standard, they should be granted a legal marriage.
My aunt and uncle were medically unable to have children, so they adopted. Even 40 years ago, I'm sure it wasn't cheap. That's an undue expense, so their marriage is verboten in ikkonoishi-land.
My parents' best friends have been married for longer than I've been alive. She's unable to have kids, and they chose not to adopt. They're not theoretically capable of producing offspring, so I guess it's manditory divorce time for them too.
If the sole purpose of marriage is to facilitate child-rearing, the logical conclusion would be to only grant a marriage license to pregnant women, presumably after a paternity test proving that her prospective husband is actually the biological father of the child.
You said: that is a straw man fallacy.
Sorry, you're wrong. Do not pass the podium, do not collect your diploma.
An argument with a logical fallacy is invalid for exactly the same reason that a mathematical statement with an arithmatic mistake is invalid. They're invalid because they have errors.
Pointing out that 2+2=5 is false is not a straw man, ad hominem or any other kind of logical fallacy -- it's a statement of mathematical truth.
Theological arguments aside, the Christian Bible IS a misleading authority when applied legal argments in the US. The law of the land is based on the Constitution of the United States, not the Bible. This country is most emphatically NOT a theocracy.
The issue at hand is whether or not the Constitution's guarantees of equal protection under the law (14th amendment) and free practice of religion (1st amendment), are being violated by refusing to grant legal recognition to the enduring relationships maintained by one segment of the population. All you accomplish by bringing the Bible into the argument is acknowledge that the prohibition of all marriages other than Christian ones is an establishment of religion, and is therefore explicitly unconstitutional. Invoking religion automatically invalidates your argument from a Constitutional perspective.
The legitimate authorities on Constitutional law are the Constitution and it's amendments, the Federalist Papers, and Supreme Court rulings. Other writings of the framers of the Constitution (such as the private papers of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Hamilton; as well as preceding documents (such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence) are legitimate authorities in the specific instances where they illuminate the mindset and intentions of the Constitution's authors.
The only legitimate place where the Bible can enter a Constitutional law debate at all is in the instances where the Founding Fathers cite it as inspiration; however, all this does is place the Bible on equal footing with other inspriational sources, the most important of these being the writings of Enlightement philosophers such as Hobbes, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
I'd remind you that when the Framers mentioned "God", they were not talking about the God modern fundimentalist Christians worship. The architects of the Constitution were predominantly Deists and Enlightenment scholars, not Christians as a modern Fundimentalist would define it. Their God was "nature's God" (as Jefferson puts it in the Declaration of Independence); this God was viewed a celestial clockmaker who created the Universe and set it in motion, and did not interfere in it's operation thereafter. When they spoke of the "laws of God", they were talking about the laws of Science and Reason as they understood them, not a mass of primitive superstituious gobbledegook.
To dissect your claim that the Christian Bible is a legitimate authority in the Gay Marriage debate:
Two probems here. First, this is a CONSTITUTIONAL LAW issue, not a MORAL issue. Second, even if it were a moral issue, moral issues ARE easily within the limits of human understanding.
The universal, rational basis of moral behavior is exceedingly simple: do no unnecessary harm to others. Everything else derives from this simple concept. Judeism and Christianity acknowledge this, in a roundabout way (the 10 commandments are mostly just a list of specific ways of harming others, and the Sermon at the Mount Jesus says the s
There are bad people in the world, and they will obtain weapons of some description no matter what precautions you take. We can't even completely disarm the inmates of maximum security prisons effectively, what makes you think that we can disarm an entire free society?
Even if you could magically destroy every firearm on the planet overnight and prevent any new ones from ever being created, you would still have violent criminals in the world, and they would still prey on those weaker and less well-armed then themselves. People were killing, raping, and robbing each other long before firearms were ever created.
In a world without firearms, people who are larger, stronger, and are more skilled at physical violence have free reign to prey on those smaller, weaker, and less skilled than themselves. The only way a 4'11", 98lb woman can effectively defend herself against a 6'3" 250lb attacker is with a firearm.
- It's wrong because the Bible says so. (Fallacy: Appeal to Authority)
- It shouldn't be allowed because it goes against long-standing societal traditions (Fallacy: Appeal to Tradition)
- It's a gay/liberal/$BUGBEAR conspiricy to undermine "traditional family values" (Fallacy: Appeal to Hatred
I disagree. Arguments based on logical fallacies are entirely without merit.There may be a well-reasoned, logical argment supporting the view that the state has a compelling interest to grant special legal benefits to people who are in one class of binding long-term relationships while denying those benefits to all other classes of long-term binding relationships, but I have yet to hear one.
First off, there's the commerce clause. Only Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce, the states are denied this power under the tenth amendment. About the only thing which MIGHT pass Constitutional muster are ISPs who only have customers in Utah. The only websites that could be put on the list would be those that are hosted in Utah, run by Utah-based companies, and have no customers outside of Utah.
Secondly, there's the matter of due process. One could argue that being put on the list deprives you of your liberty to conduct lawful business and unfairly stigmitizes you. Some faceless beaurocrat blacklisting you and forcing you to go through an appeals process to prove that you are not guilty is antithetical to the concept of due process.
Personally, I'd rather have my kids see Bob Goatse in all his glory than have them stumble across this poisonous filth accidentially. Somehow I doubt the things I think are offensive will find their way on to the list.
One flaw with our system of government is that politicians are not punished for intentionally passing legislation they know to be unconstitutional. Politicians who sponsor, vote for, or enact unconstitutional laws should be held criminally liable for their malfeasance.
Virtually every elected official in the country has sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. By willfully violating this oath they should by rights forfeit their office.
It's my opinon that promoting and lobbying for blatantly unconstituional laws constitutes seditious conspiricy under US law. IMHO The governer of Utah should be arrested, stripped of power, and sent to Federal PMITA prison for 20 years.
Doing the D-A-D conversion is a last resort, but it's 100% guaranteed to work. As long as your analog signal path is clean, any noise introduced will be below the threshold of what an ordinary human can detect. If you have shitty hardware, of course it's going to affect the quality, but that's not a problem with the process, it's a problem with your hardware.
Likewise, in my experience, there is no appreciable quality loss when reencoding from one lossy format to another, as long as the destination codec is at the same or higher bitrate as the original. A professional sound engineer or serious audiophile might be able to tell the difference, but it's pretty likely you won't, particuarly if you're listening to it on a portable device. Someone who is a serious audiophile probably wouldn't have his music collection encoded in a 128Kbps lossy codec in the first place.
Unless you have an absolute POS sound card, any loss of fidelity due to the digital - analog - digital round trip will be undetectable to the human ear, particuarly if the original digital source was encoded with a lossy codec.
Well, I finally figured it out -- even though the command line worker programs (/usr/bin/cdrecord and /usr/bin/cdrdao) are install suid root, for some reason k3b still barfs unless it is run as root.
I find this odd considering that k3b is just supposed to be a front-end for the command line tools.
- Apple has excess inventory that isn't moving fast enough. Selling it at cost (or even at a loss) lets them put that money into something that IS moving.
- Advertising value. Apple gets to use Pixar as a showcase of what their hardware can do.
- Cross-promotion/licensing. In exchange for providing discounted hardware, Apple gets mentioned in the credits, product placements, etc; and gets cheap/free licences to make tie-in products.
There's a lot of ways of getting compensation other than cash.I'm a decent engineer; if I was sufficiently motivated I could possibly be a great one. But I could never, no matter how hard I tried, become a professional baseball player, because I just don't have the natural ability in that area. Conversely, I seriously doubt that the average major-league baseball player has the aptitude to become an engineer.
The gay marriage issue is about the seperation of Church and State, pure and simple. You have one group of people who want to use the power of government impose THEIR ideology on everyone else, and you have another group who are sick and fucking tired of having someone else's religion forced down their throat every time they turn around.
If Bob and Neil want to marry each other, how the FUCK does that "dilute" my marriage? It doesn't make me love my wife any less, or her love me any less, or interfere in any way with us raising our children.
Part of the problem that you narrow-minded nitwits can't get through your thick skulls is that the word "marriage" has two completely distinct meanings. There is the religious sacrement of marriage, which is whatever your religion of choice says it is; and there is the secular and legal institution of marriage which recognizes that a permenent bond exists between two people.
No one is saying that your CHURCH has to marry gay couples -- that would be an unconstitutional limit on your free practice of religion. If your church only wants to perform marriages between people of the same race and opposite genders, so be it. What happens behind the doors of your church is your business; what happens behind the doors of other peoples' bedrooms is theirs.
What they are saying is that ALL couples in binding relationships are entitled to equal protection under the law, as guaranteed by the Constitution, regardless of whether the gender of the participants. Get it?
So many "adaptations" of books these days are just blatant attempts to cash in on name recognition of a popular author.
Jackson's adaptation of LoTR is particuarly frustrating to fans of the books, as he made such a big deal of how faithful he was going to be to the books when he started the project. When they hit the screen we found that he STILL wound up pulling a bunch of completely inauthentic scenes out off his ass and managed to completely screw up a number of key plot points for no good reason. It wouldn't have been so offensive if he hadn't lied to the fans from the start.
No, Card should keep his politics out of his writing because when he tries to mix them, the results suck.
Of course a real BOFH would mount /home with noexec... of course that would make it difficult to do any productive work either, but at least you wouldn't be playing games!
The doctrine of Biblical Literalism rampant among fundimentalists declares that ALL of the Bible is the 100% correct and accurate Word of God, without any possiblity of error or mistranslation. Therefore, literalist Fundimentalists have to resolve these glaringly obvious contridictions with doubletalk and wishful thinking in order to maintain their irrational and historicly inaccurate belief in an an exact literal interpretation of the Bible.
This is the crux of the problem -- fundimentalist doctrine holds that the Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God, and the King James Bible is [a|the only] divinely inspired translation thereof. This belief dictates that the Bible is ALWAYS right, and it CANNOT have any errors in translation.
According to this doctrine, God was holding the translator's hand when he translated the Hebrew text as "thou shall not kill" instead of "thou shall not commit murder", so that translatation MUST, by their own definition, be *exactly* what God wanted it to be. Any real-world evidence which contridicts this belief needs to be discredited, supressed, ignored, or explained away with convoluted logic.
"thou shalt not suffer a witch to live", while not a commandment, is still a direct quote from the Old Testament (Exodus 22:18). Since fundimentalist Christian doctrine holds that the King James Bible is a divinely-inspired translation of "the literal and inerrant Word of God", they still treat this as being one of God's instructions to them.