I've talked with gays who are very offended by the notion that it is either an inherited, genetic trait, (or a spiritual curse); and maintain that, indeed, it is a choice, (moral or immoral).
They're very concerned about research that's going to "prove" a "gay gene" - because it could lead to a "cure". . . and an involuntary administration of the cure. Just as they are concerned about the anti-gaying boot-camps that religious organizations offer (to reverse the spiritual curse).
But if one even goes there; one ends up debating the nature and definition of choice. What is it? Does it exist at all? I like mu as an answer.
The way I got through Scouts, and the way that I'm working with my son to get through it, is to stretch the definition of "faith in god" to something a bit more naturalistic. Appreciation of the world around us, belief in a moral center of "good" versus "bad", respect for others. I'm comfortable that we're following the spirit of the faith requirements, even if it's not exactly what the BSA had in mind.
frankly, that's far closer to Lord Baden Powell's vision, than what we see coming out of National today. . .
Rules are only as good as the folks who enforce them.
As King John found out, any dictator of rules requires compliant enforcers. If you don't take care of your Barons, you find yourself having to sign a Magna Carta at swordpoint.
This is true in the BSA too. Individual councils and units can certainly ignore national rules. And it is trending such that, sooner or later, those national rules WILL change. (more likely, later, I'm guessing. . . )
No; it really depends on the local group and council.
Some groups are chartered by churches. I know of one local troop, chartered by an LDS church, and all the boys are LDS; I have heard that they wolfpacked-out a boy who was Lutheran. Low-grade harassment, and because the council chair was LDS, complaints went nowhere, even when they went up the chain to national. There was no "official" endorsement of a religion, so they couldn't do anything. Well, the Lutheran boy found another troop.
On the other hand, my troop is chartered by a catholic church, and we have a couple of Jewish kids, Baptist, Non-denominational/Pentacostal, and the Chaplain is actually an Agnostic, when you talk with him about it.
So it really depends on the makeup of the Parent Committee, and the other adults, who are responsible for enforcing the national organizational rules, against what is otherwise, essentially, a boy-run troop. If they're not willing to enforce those rules vigorously, it can end up being a problem. This reflects on the reputation of BSA as a whole, when individual units do these kinds of things, but when those adults are volunteers, and those contributions of time and effort are at a premium, there's really not a whole lot one can do. You can talk to the Committee folks and try to convince them, and that failing, you can either live with it, or quit.
In my troop, we're mostly pretty good about enforcing BSA rules about bullying, teasing, religious rights, and especially, we're very strict with uniforms (our boys seem to like it that way, otherwise they'd leave and join the other troops who aren't so strict). But we also have a couple of parents who are a real pain in the ass, they argue and drag out the meetings, and resist any kind of change. Fundraising, and training have become serious issues, because some of the activities are becoming "beyond the financial means of ordinary, middle-class working-people" - yet they aren't open to new fundraising ideas to help the poor-er boys pay for these activites. You can't "fire" these difficult people.
Another point is to create a permanent underclass who will never be employable again in their lives, so that they will be forced to take lower-paying jobs. When significant numbers of people are permanently marked like this, for non-violent drug offenses, then before you know it, you've got the next-best-thing to a slave-labor force: slave-labor, that has to pay for their own housing and car-insurance!
Well, in America, it's pretty much a given that even if you spend 6 months in prison, you're never going to have much of a chance at a normal life outside again. You're never going to have a real, legitimate job, of the kind that pays enough to support a family.
What's probably going on here, is that he wants to change his story, that he had an argument, went nuts, and accidentally killed her (second degree murder: First requires proof of premeditation).
So if he can cough-up the body, maybe there's physical evidence that there was no premeditation.
It's arguable that Werner Von Braun, father of the V-2, was also instrumental in getting the US to the moon (solving some of the really hard parts of development of the Saturn V). I'm not sure what Von Braun's political stance was. . .
Ferdinand Porsche was very public about being "politically neutral" (which was about the only safe degree to take against the third reich) - and was still arrested for war crimes by the French, and spent time imprisoned in a tractor factory.
At the same time, great American Industrialists like Ford, (or Prescott Bush!) (or Adolph Coors, another family that supports the right-wing extremists in the US) not only were publicly in support of the third reich's political positions, they openly provided material support to the nazis.
Bill Gates, with his vision, arguably, changed the face of personal computing radically; early Microsoft efforts may not have been the best quality, but they put personal computers into the hands of, well, PEOPLE, in an era where computers were completely unaffordable to all but large corporations. And we know where his vision went after that. . .
Then there's the entire concept of Socialism; which, while it has it's logical flaws, is usually never attacked logically on the basis of those flaws, and instead, is attacked on the basis that Stalin killed 60 million Russians, and therefore, anything to the left of Ronald Reagan is Evil, and comes from the Devil.
If anyone has a reason to look for an excuse to shoot-down RieserFS, or Rieser's ideas, they won't have to look far for a bogus reason (having nothing to do with technical merits or a business case). For many people - that will be enough to make the decision.
well - if one country has triggermen who are LOOKING for an excuse, a meteor impact would be a very convenient one.
"oops! we thought it was a nuclear strike. my bad. Sorry."
compare this to: "oops, we thought Saddam had active WMD programs, and was 40 minutes away from launching a chemical strike on Tel Aviv. Sorry. My bad."
By sitting on patents, and stifling innovation, new competitors are discouraged from entering in practically any market, which preserves existing oligarchies and pricing models, allowing Corporate Citizens to continue to charge monopoly prices for products, increasing Corporate profits! Our economy will just GROW AND GROW!
That's why innovation and invention must be stopped at all costs!
Where are the exponential growth drivers of the twenty-first century?
Portable devices. Smart phones.
Game consoles.
Media centers.
The Internet (and cell-phone networks) will be the vehicle for delivery of content to these devices.
But the only thing I see driving PC sales is: 1. Social Network applications for which portable devices or media-center-type devices are insufficient. (which is a subset of people who are now buying PC's).
2. Software developers who are developing software for the above devices.
3. High-end content development and production (writers, engineers, etc.)
Yeah - I don't see a lot of volume in PC sales like I do in the portable devices market; which will, eventually, converge around cell-phones. The coolest thing about my iPhone was the ubiquitous connectivity I got - even though EDGE sucked - it sucked way worse when I cancelled AT&T, and had to deal with the fruitless hotspot-hunting.
As much as we don't like the idea, it's going to be the cell-phone providers driving this stuff. And it's going to suck in a huge way. Because as cool and attractive as the iPhone model is - there's like 10 Verizon customers for every iPhone customer. iPhone+AT&T just don't add up for *most* people. But the demand is there. People WANT mobile computing and messaging. They just don't want to deal with the crappy limitations imposed by iPhone+AT&T (no picture/video messaging, outrageous pricing, etc.) (me? I hacked my iPhone - but that's not *most* folks out there - who are buying the new blackberry and LG phones (er - getting them subsidized with a service contract) and using them on the cheaper services).
Too awesome, in fact. I attribute many of their lame decisions in the design of the original IBM PC, to the fact that they were freaking IBM for bob's sake. They had their mainframe monopoly, and a good proportion of the consultancy and field services market tied up. They had no real competition, and were betting on the fact that they would own the PC market all by themselves, based on the IBM street-cred alone.
(this turned out to be not true; just arrogant speculation on their part - Compaq saved their asses by reverse engineering the BIOS and opening up the platform - otherwise, the x86 platform would just be another footnote in the ugly history that was the early PC-age.)
My guess is that Commodore would have been the eventual victor. Remember the Amiga?
Monopolies don't try hard to make awesome products, because they don't have to. This usually ends up being their downfall. As we have seen with IBM, and we are apparently seeing with Microsoft.
They are bound by law to expose their API to third party developers, and so far, the court has not bothered to enforce this ruling.
However, judging by the craptacular performance of their latest offerings, my guess is that they're no longer reaping any effective benefit to leveraging any "hidden undocumented API".
Last company I left - I worked my ass off for an internal promotion, and they finally approved the new req, and I went through formal interviews, got the job, and they lowballed me with some BS "HR policy says nobody gets more than 6% increase without VP approval."
I said "bye".
. . . and got 15% at my next job.
Note to HR departments: You will not retain talent if your raises do not keep up with inflation.
. . . not to mention very detailed geneaologies (some dating back to the "dawn of time" in his universe) of pretty much all of the protagonists, and many of the minor characters as well, (it's beyond me why he didn't take the time to tell us about Uglik the orc-chieftan's neices and nephews, great grandparents including historical lineage back to the great orc-lords of the ancient world. . . )
People dying by the millions won't even put a dent in it.
People would have to die by the hundreds of millions.
No war in the history of mankind has ever come close to that. It will take a large-scale nuclear, or biological war. (I don't think chemical warfare would do it - we can't distribute a chemical that widely. - but maybe a self-replicating nanotech device would do it.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've talked with gays who are very offended by the notion that it is either an inherited, genetic trait, (or a spiritual curse); and maintain that, indeed, it is a choice, (moral or immoral).
They're very concerned about research that's going to "prove" a "gay gene" - because it could lead to a "cure". . . and an involuntary administration of the cure. Just as they are concerned about the anti-gaying boot-camps that religious organizations offer (to reverse the spiritual curse).
But if one even goes there; one ends up debating the nature and definition of choice. What is it? Does it exist at all? I like mu as an answer.
The way I got through Scouts, and the way that I'm working with my son to get through it, is to stretch the definition of "faith in god" to something a bit more naturalistic. Appreciation of the world around us, belief in a moral center of "good" versus "bad", respect for others. I'm comfortable that we're following the spirit of the faith requirements, even if it's not exactly what the BSA had in mind.
frankly, that's far closer to Lord Baden Powell's vision, than what we see coming out of National today. . .
What, exactly, do you mean by "the mormon church buys them out"?
I'm very interested in hearing more about this.
My employer is forbidden to donate to BSA by government rules. Because of the religious stipulation.
Rules are only as good as the folks who enforce them.
As King John found out, any dictator of rules requires compliant enforcers. If you don't take care of your Barons, you find yourself having to sign a Magna Carta at swordpoint.
This is true in the BSA too. Individual councils and units can certainly ignore national rules. And it is trending such that, sooner or later, those national rules WILL change. (more likely, later, I'm guessing. . . )
No; it really depends on the local group and council.
Some groups are chartered by churches.
I know of one local troop, chartered by an LDS church, and all the boys are LDS; I have heard that they wolfpacked-out a boy who was Lutheran. Low-grade harassment, and because the council chair was LDS, complaints went nowhere, even when they went up the chain to national. There was no "official" endorsement of a religion, so they couldn't do anything. Well, the Lutheran boy found another troop.
On the other hand, my troop is chartered by a catholic church, and we have a couple of Jewish kids, Baptist, Non-denominational/Pentacostal, and the Chaplain is actually an Agnostic, when you talk with him about it.
So it really depends on the makeup of the Parent Committee, and the other adults, who are responsible for enforcing the national organizational rules, against what is otherwise, essentially, a boy-run troop. If they're not willing to enforce those rules vigorously, it can end up being a problem. This reflects on the reputation of BSA as a whole, when individual units do these kinds of things, but when those adults are volunteers, and those contributions of time and effort are at a premium, there's really not a whole lot one can do. You can talk to the Committee folks and try to convince them, and that failing, you can either live with it, or quit.
In my troop, we're mostly pretty good about enforcing BSA rules about bullying, teasing, religious rights, and especially, we're very strict with uniforms (our boys seem to like it that way, otherwise they'd leave and join the other troops who aren't so strict). But we also have a couple of parents who are a real pain in the ass, they argue and drag out the meetings, and resist any kind of change. Fundraising, and training have become serious issues, because some of the activities are becoming "beyond the financial means of ordinary, middle-class working-people" - yet they aren't open to new fundraising ideas to help the poor-er boys pay for these activites. You can't "fire" these difficult people.
Another point is to create a permanent underclass who will never be employable again in their lives, so that they will be forced to take lower-paying jobs. When significant numbers of people are permanently marked like this, for non-violent drug offenses, then before you know it, you've got the next-best-thing to a slave-labor force: slave-labor, that has to pay for their own housing and car-insurance!
Well, in America, it's pretty much a given that even if you spend 6 months in prison, you're never going to have much of a chance at a normal life outside again. You're never going to have a real, legitimate job, of the kind that pays enough to support a family.
What's probably going on here, is that he wants to change his story, that he had an argument, went nuts, and accidentally killed her (second degree murder: First requires proof of premeditation).
So if he can cough-up the body, maybe there's physical evidence that there was no premeditation.
Or - the Russians might have beaten us, and we would have lost hope and quit, like they did when we beat them.
It's arguable that Werner Von Braun, father of the V-2, was also instrumental in getting the US to the moon (solving some of the really hard parts of development of the Saturn V). I'm not sure what Von Braun's political stance was. . .
Ferdinand Porsche was very public about being "politically neutral" (which was about the only safe degree to take against the third reich) - and was still arrested for war crimes by the French, and spent time imprisoned in a tractor factory.
At the same time, great American Industrialists like Ford, (or Prescott Bush!) (or Adolph Coors, another family that supports the right-wing extremists in the US) not only were publicly in support of the third reich's political positions, they openly provided material support to the nazis.
Bill Gates, with his vision, arguably, changed the face of personal computing radically; early Microsoft efforts may not have been the best quality, but they put personal computers into the hands of, well, PEOPLE, in an era where computers were completely unaffordable to all but large corporations. And we know where his vision went after that. . .
Then there's the entire concept of Socialism; which, while it has it's logical flaws, is usually never attacked logically on the basis of those flaws, and instead, is attacked on the basis that Stalin killed 60 million Russians, and therefore, anything to the left of Ronald Reagan is Evil, and comes from the Devil.
If anyone has a reason to look for an excuse to shoot-down RieserFS, or Rieser's ideas, they won't have to look far for a bogus reason (having nothing to do with technical merits or a business case). For many people - that will be enough to make the decision.
well - if one country has triggermen who are LOOKING for an excuse, a meteor impact would be a very convenient one.
"oops! we thought it was a nuclear strike. my bad. Sorry."
compare this to:
"oops, we thought Saddam had active WMD programs, and was 40 minutes away from launching a chemical strike on Tel Aviv. Sorry. My bad."
au contraire!
It adds TONS of value to the economy!
By sitting on patents, and stifling innovation, new competitors are discouraged from entering in practically any market, which preserves existing oligarchies and pricing models, allowing Corporate Citizens to continue to charge monopoly prices for products, increasing Corporate profits! Our economy will just GROW AND GROW!
That's why innovation and invention must be stopped at all costs!
Where are the exponential growth drivers of the twenty-first century?
Portable devices.
Smart phones.
Game consoles.
Media centers.
The Internet (and cell-phone networks) will be the vehicle for delivery of content to these devices.
But the only thing I see driving PC sales is:
1. Social Network applications for which portable devices or media-center-type devices are insufficient. (which is a subset of people who are now buying PC's).
2. Software developers who are developing software for the above devices.
3. High-end content development and production (writers, engineers, etc.)
Yeah - I don't see a lot of volume in PC sales like I do in the portable devices market; which will, eventually, converge around cell-phones. The coolest thing about my iPhone was the ubiquitous connectivity I got - even though EDGE sucked - it sucked way worse when I cancelled AT&T, and had to deal with the fruitless hotspot-hunting.
As much as we don't like the idea, it's going to be the cell-phone providers driving this stuff. And it's going to suck in a huge way. Because as cool and attractive as the iPhone model is - there's like 10 Verizon customers for every iPhone customer. iPhone+AT&T just don't add up for *most* people. But the demand is there. People WANT mobile computing and messaging. They just don't want to deal with the crappy limitations imposed by iPhone+AT&T (no picture/video messaging, outrageous pricing, etc.) (me? I hacked my iPhone - but that's not *most* folks out there - who are buying the new blackberry and LG phones (er - getting them subsidized with a service contract) and using them on the cheaper services).
IBM was an awesome company.
Too awesome, in fact. I attribute many of their lame decisions in the design of the original IBM PC, to the fact that they were freaking IBM for bob's sake. They had their mainframe monopoly, and a good proportion of the consultancy and field services market tied up. They had no real competition, and were betting on the fact that they would own the PC market all by themselves, based on the IBM street-cred alone.
(this turned out to be not true; just arrogant speculation on their part - Compaq saved their asses by reverse engineering the BIOS and opening up the platform - otherwise, the x86 platform would just be another footnote in the ugly history that was the early PC-age.)
My guess is that Commodore would have been the eventual victor. Remember the Amiga?
Monopolies don't try hard to make awesome products, because they don't have to. This usually ends up being their downfall. As we have seen with IBM, and we are apparently seeing with Microsoft.
Undocumented API's are fine in common practice.
But Microsoft is a CONVICTED MONOPOLIST.
They are bound by law to expose their API to third party developers, and so far, the court has not bothered to enforce this ruling.
However, judging by the craptacular performance of their latest offerings, my guess is that they're no longer reaping any effective benefit to leveraging any "hidden undocumented API".
yeah.
Start->Run->/cygdrive/c/cygwin/bin/bash -c shutdown -s 00
. . . just what I needed on a drab Thursday afternoon! Another language flamewar on Slashdot!
Okay - so where are the Defenders of Honor for BASIC?
In my help-desk job, we had a saying:
"You either learn out, or you burn out."
That is all.
. . . absolutely!
Last company I left - I worked my ass off for an internal promotion, and they finally approved the new req, and I went through formal interviews, got the job, and they lowballed me with some BS "HR policy says nobody gets more than 6% increase without VP approval."
I said "bye".
. . . and got 15% at my next job.
Note to HR departments:
You will not retain talent if your raises do not keep up with inflation.
I don't know how representative of the population I am, as a sample.
But I won't pay, if given the choice.
I am a cheap bastard.
I don't give to charity.
I don't tithe.
(though I am a generous tipper, if the service is worthy.)
I'm sure not everyone is like me though. I'm an exceptionally cheap bastard.
. . . not to mention very detailed geneaologies (some dating back to the "dawn of time" in his universe) of pretty much all of the protagonists, and many of the minor characters as well, (it's beyond me why he didn't take the time to tell us about Uglik the orc-chieftan's neices and nephews, great grandparents including historical lineage back to the great orc-lords of the ancient world. . . )
actually, I think this law is a bad idea.
Let the health insurance companies discriminate all they want.
Nothing would make the American voting public vote in an effective NHS faster.
Aw hell; I waited 2 freaking years with debilitating back pain before my HMO doctor would recommend a freaking MRI.
By then it was too late, the wear on my cartilege was irreversible, and the bones had begun to fuse. (constant pain? you bet!).
The criteria for an MRI was that I had to lose bowel or bladder function from nerve damage.
But they certainly got my monthly premium all that time.
People dying by the millions won't even put a dent in it.
People would have to die by the hundreds of millions.
No war in the history of mankind has ever come close to that. It will take a large-scale nuclear, or biological war. (I don't think chemical warfare would do it - we can't distribute a chemical that widely. - but maybe a self-replicating nanotech device would do it.)