I, for one, would forego such treatments if I had to live with the idea that a life was created and then destroyed just so that I could be cured.
I understand your point of view on all of this completely. I shared it until recently. But now I find it curious how someone could so love a god that would create a life, an entire universe of perception with hopes and fears, something whose ending is every bit as sad as all of reality being snuffed out, just to have it vacuumed out and killed before it takes its first breath and not immediately sending it to whatever paradise you get to go to if you're the best of the best.
I couldn't love that god, and I did love God, back when I was convinced he was there, so the only option, for me at least, is to believe that that's not what he does. He doesn't create a life of consequence (a soul-having life, or whatever you want to call that thing you feel sorry for when someone dies) if it's just going to be snuffed out. Unless he's immediately sending it to Heaven, in which case that kid just won the lottery, 'cause it ain't like he had a lot invested in this particular plane of existence. But that doesn't seem like something He would do. Maybe, but I don't see it. He seems to put a lot of testing in before you get to the happy place. And I sure as hell refuse to believe in any God that would make a life just to send it somewhere unpleasant when it died before it had any chance to avoid it. So that just leaves the option where that thing is probably just a ball of kidney and foot, and if it weren't, He wouldn't let you rip it out. Because I couldn't worship a cruel god.
Or, more likely, His ways are beyond comprehension, but He chooses not to speak up, so he'll just have to accept that some of us are just going to go on our best guess that it's probably okay to kill things of equal or lesser complexity than big spiders, and if He wanted us to be smarter, maybe He should have given us a few more of those Knowledge Tree apples.
God believes that all life is sacred.
Even potatoes?
I hope God's not ticked about the dust mites I squished when I sat down.
It's obvious that War is Peace, Big Brother, blah blah blah. It's about the ten thousandth time I've seen a 1984 reference on slashdot and predictably modded insightful. That is obvious.
I agree entirely.
And BTW, this story is not about the US's toy, it's a German toy being used by the Brits.
I'm aware. I said "generally." Or some word like "generally", I don't feel like going back and checking my exact phrasing. The GP spoke in terms of slashdot tendencies, and I followed suit.
the predictable US-bashing commences from out of nowhere.
But it's oh so much fun.
The only thing obvious is the way lefty slashbots go into a frenzy to bash the US wherever they can. It's so sad and pathetic.
Funny how these quotes rarely are posted or modded up on slashdot, yet Orwell here has been beaten to a bloody pulp.
Because they're obvious. How many times have you heard someone on Slashdot say we should disband the military? I'm sure some very deep things have been said by some scholarly men about how delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are, but unless someone takes the position that they're bad, it doesn't make a ton of sense to quote them.
The complaints are generally about how the US has historically used its toys for questionable purposes, and in that context some worry about new toys being developed may, in some cases, be called for.
A first point-to-point Internet protocol includes the steps of (a) storing in a database a respective IP address of a set of processing units that have an on-line status with respect to the Internet; (b) transmitting a query from a first processing unit to a connection server to determine the on-line status of a second processing unit; and (c) retrieving the IP address of the second unit from the database using the connection server, in response to the determination of a positive on-line status of the second processing unit, for establishing a point-to-point communication link between the first and second processing units through the Internet.
No wonder you can patent anything. I've been programming forever and my eyes glazed over after two sentences. Is this actually what the patent office requires, or is it just written this way to make the examiner skip to breaking out the "they don't pay me enough for this, just take the patent" stamp part of the process? If it's the latter, those frigging monkeys have got to build a form letter that says, "Dear patent applicant: Please learn to talk like a fricking human. We don't have time for your BS. Thanks, The Patent Office. PS. De-frigging-nied." If they actually require that convoluted crap, then it's time we went down there with torches.
By the way you do realize that "world" in world series is a cruel joke right?
Oh, we know. Every year we invite you foreign buttholes, try to make nice, put all our differences aside for a friendly game, but do you show up? No. We just sit here all by ourselves with our "Go France" foam fingers and cry into our beer that no one showed up for our party, so we scrimmage and go home, and then you guys wonder why we bomb the shit out of you.
The whole point of parties was as an assurance that an individual politician would be bound to a certain platform of ideas and committed to executing them; if they did not, they would be punished politically by the party apparatus.
That may have been the point, but I think it's pretty clear now that it doesn't work that way.
It amazes me any time anyone talks about voting for a candidate, as if they could really know anything about their integrity or character!
If you can't tell if a guy is a dirtbag or not after a campaign, then you probably weren't paying attention. Or your guy is a diabolical genius, but that's pretty rare. If you're not going to pay enough attention to them to tell, then please, for the love of God, don't pollute the vote with your random guess.
And I have no idea what point you're trying to make when you're obviously disagreeing with the concept of voting based on an individual rather than closing your eyes and voting for a loosely-defined group while also pointing out that the party system in the US is broken.
"Word got around that the copied textbooks weren't such a great deal after all and by the end of the semester the store that sold them was out of business."
Where's the little picture of Captain Copyright standing outside the burnt-out building with a gas can?
The Google guys must laugh their asses off about this stuff. Either that, or it's a kind of public brainstorming. "Okay, nobody came up with anything especially cool for gbrowser, let's register googlebeans and see if anybody comes up with a product we can sell."
Now which issue was it that you deem unworthy? Was it one of these?
No, because, as I mentioned, I'm pretty sure it had something to do with construction. Though I could be wrong. It definitely wasn't any of those, though, since I've never been to any of those places.
Your advice to protestors to be forgettable seems unlikely to bring attention to their cause
I'm going to request as politely as possible that you learn to read before you respond. I never said anything like that.
That's an excellent list of examples of what can happen when jerks with a good cause get together to say with a unified, asshole voice what everyone was already else was already saying politely and constructively. I particularly like the one where they got together to protest gas prices by making people use more gas. That was swell of them.
Are you by chance a protest organizer?
That does sound like a good idea.
If so, the organization is almost certainly eager to have your contribution.
Same organization that creates dangerous situations for innocent people and costs thousands of dollars in lost productivity for people who had nothing to do with anything? 'Cause thanks, but no thanks.
All protests are inconvenient to somebody. Yes, but let's just do our best to only make them inconvenient to whoever we're protesting against. I'm guessing we don't like them much anyway.
It seems to me that you are not the type to care about any protesters.
That is largely true, but only because they almost always preach to the choir, and by the time you get significant numbers of protestors, the choir is usually already singing pretty loudly.
So in other words don't protest at all.
A comprehensive guide to protesting was beyond the scope of my comment (as was accuracy, apparently. The picture doesn't show them handing things out, it shows them showing signs. Oops. My bad), but it should certainly not be taken as encouragement not to protest. Just protest better. Put some thought into whose mind you're trying to change and what the best way to do that might be. My personal favorite plan, to be implemented just as soon as I have a cause with co-supporters and some cash at the same time, is a protest party. Subsidize the beer, invite your supporters and those you hope to convince (with careful planning so as to ensure they're a minority), and let them mingle. Invite a reporter or two. Get the Foo Fighters to play, they'll support anything.
Kidding about the Foo Fighters. And obviously that's not a full plan, since there are some obvious (but solvable) problems in this synopsis form. But there's one suggestion.
Or do what you feel like, I'd just try real hard not to tick off any passing newspaper opinion writers is all, 'cause the ones that are there because they were sent by their press-masters will probably just scratch the surface of your issue when they're forced to report on it. The passer-by reporter might actually care.
And obviously, there are exceptions to everything I've said. Sometimes the shouting Bible guy works. I just wouldn't do it.
But when you are opposing a corrupt system of backscratchers that has more systemic power than you do, a dramatically tilted market, a gov't that gets paid to not care about the free market, and an apathetic/sheeplike populace
Persuasion tip #2: If you hope to be productive, under no circumstances use the words, "But when you are opposing a corrupt system of backscratchers that has more systemic power than you do, a dramatically tilted market, a gov't that gets paid to not care about the free market, and an apathetic/sheeplike populace." Or anything remotely resembling that.
The point of a protest is to get people to pay attention to your cause. If the press coverage of a protest is such that at least some people learn more about your cause than they knew before, then it can be considered a success.
We had a protest around here where a bunch of jerk-holes got together and stood on a five-lane highway during rush hour, blocking traffic for miles and miles, to protest something, I no longer remember what (a comment on the effectiveness of this crap on its own) (I think it had something to do with construction hiring or something). But I do remember it placed me squarely on the "screw those f***ers" side and by no means made me want to investigate the problem and form a reasoned opinion, and I wasn't even on that road that day.
That, of course, is a much crappier way to protest than bunny suits that don't block traffic, but they're still (in the picture, at least), handing out pamphlets to people who probably don't care and are going to be annoyed at the inconvenience.
So because I support the cause, here's a tip for aspiring protestors: Be unobtrusive (no assaulting strangers with pamphlets), be unrepetitive, be respectful, and be funny. Being liked is way more important than being right. If they like you, they'll look into your problem.
And please make sure you're actually funny if you're going for funny. Not-funny funny is worse than just standing in the commons and reading the Bible at the top of your lungs.
I liked that quote when I first heard it, and I liked it the next 241 times, and I still agree with it completely, but by now can we please modify Slashdot to auto-mod it to -1, Ultra-Redundant?
"A little box on the keyboard wire"? I'm sorry, but do you imagine Chinese intelligence to be run by 14-year-old pranksters that get their spy supplies at ThinkGeek?
there really isn't a real "Right to Privacy" in the Constitution
My comment here has nothing to do with anything, but why the hell not? Why is there less of a push for a privacy amendment than there is for a let-Arnold-run-for-president amendment? Frigging ridiculous. Someone with a law degree, or at least anyone more electable than an unemployed programmer, please get on top of that.
If we don't want the government to look over our shoulders, then we can't bitch when they didn't see something coming.
Obviously turning the "encrypted number" back into a real one would never slip from "a threat was found" to "we wanted to know who it was".
You're crapping on an effective means of controlling who gets access to data because there's a possibility it might not be used properly in some instances. If it's not used properly, then we have the situation we already are in. At the very least, we can file this under "better and under no circumstances worse."
Whether or not we can label it "good" is beyond the scope of me.
Slashdot Mirror
I, for one, would forego such treatments if I had to live with the idea that a life was created and then destroyed just so that I could be cured.
I understand your point of view on all of this completely. I shared it until recently. But now I find it curious how someone could so love a god that would create a life, an entire universe of perception with hopes and fears, something whose ending is every bit as sad as all of reality being snuffed out, just to have it vacuumed out and killed before it takes its first breath and not immediately sending it to whatever paradise you get to go to if you're the best of the best.
I couldn't love that god, and I did love God, back when I was convinced he was there, so the only option, for me at least, is to believe that that's not what he does. He doesn't create a life of consequence (a soul-having life, or whatever you want to call that thing you feel sorry for when someone dies) if it's just going to be snuffed out. Unless he's immediately sending it to Heaven, in which case that kid just won the lottery, 'cause it ain't like he had a lot invested in this particular plane of existence. But that doesn't seem like something He would do. Maybe, but I don't see it. He seems to put a lot of testing in before you get to the happy place. And I sure as hell refuse to believe in any God that would make a life just to send it somewhere unpleasant when it died before it had any chance to avoid it. So that just leaves the option where that thing is probably just a ball of kidney and foot, and if it weren't, He wouldn't let you rip it out. Because I couldn't worship a cruel god.
Or, more likely, His ways are beyond comprehension, but He chooses not to speak up, so he'll just have to accept that some of us are just going to go on our best guess that it's probably okay to kill things of equal or lesser complexity than big spiders, and if He wanted us to be smarter, maybe He should have given us a few more of those Knowledge Tree apples.
God believes that all life is sacred.
Even potatoes?
I hope God's not ticked about the dust mites I squished when I sat down.
Harvard, doing its very best to ensure the guys running the Republicans have enough nonsense issues to keep control indefinitely.
For example, if Yahoo dating service is able to block 98% of scammers, while Match.com is only able to block 75%, then who should win?
Okay, now what if they're both only able to block 1% (+/- 1% false positives)?
I guess we'll just let the free market's panacea of just-short-of-fraudulent marketing fix everything.
Thank God. The real world is boring as hell.
It's obvious that War is Peace, Big Brother, blah blah blah. It's about the ten thousandth time I've seen a 1984 reference on slashdot and predictably modded insightful. That is obvious.
I agree entirely.
And BTW, this story is not about the US's toy, it's a German toy being used by the Brits.
I'm aware. I said "generally." Or some word like "generally", I don't feel like going back and checking my exact phrasing. The GP spoke in terms of slashdot tendencies, and I followed suit.
the predictable US-bashing commences from out of nowhere.
But it's oh so much fun.
The only thing obvious is the way lefty slashbots go into a frenzy to bash the US wherever they can. It's so sad and pathetic.
Once again, we don't disagree.
Funny how these quotes rarely are posted or modded up on slashdot, yet Orwell here has been beaten to a bloody pulp.
Because they're obvious. How many times have you heard someone on Slashdot say we should disband the military? I'm sure some very deep things have been said by some scholarly men about how delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are, but unless someone takes the position that they're bad, it doesn't make a ton of sense to quote them.
The complaints are generally about how the US has historically used its toys for questionable purposes, and in that context some worry about new toys being developed may, in some cases, be called for.
How the hell is this how things work?
A first point-to-point Internet protocol includes the steps of (a) storing in a database a respective IP address of a set of processing units that have an on-line status with respect to the Internet; (b) transmitting a query from a first processing unit to a connection server to determine the on-line status of a second processing unit; and (c) retrieving the IP address of the second unit from the database using the connection server, in response to the determination of a positive on-line status of the second processing unit, for establishing a point-to-point communication link between the first and second processing units through the Internet.
No wonder you can patent anything. I've been programming forever and my eyes glazed over after two sentences. Is this actually what the patent office requires, or is it just written this way to make the examiner skip to breaking out the "they don't pay me enough for this, just take the patent" stamp part of the process? If it's the latter, those frigging monkeys have got to build a form letter that says, "Dear patent applicant: Please learn to talk like a fricking human. We don't have time for your BS. Thanks, The Patent Office. PS. De-frigging-nied." If they actually require that convoluted crap, then it's time we went down there with torches.
By the way you do realize that "world" in world series is a cruel joke right?
Oh, we know. Every year we invite you foreign buttholes, try to make nice, put all our differences aside for a friendly game, but do you show up? No. We just sit here all by ourselves with our "Go France" foam fingers and cry into our beer that no one showed up for our party, so we scrimmage and go home, and then you guys wonder why we bomb the shit out of you.
Real nice, World. Real nice.
The whole point of parties was as an assurance that an individual politician would be bound to a certain platform of ideas and committed to executing them; if they did not, they would be punished politically by the party apparatus.
That may have been the point, but I think it's pretty clear now that it doesn't work that way.
It amazes me any time anyone talks about voting for a candidate, as if they could really know anything about their integrity or character!
If you can't tell if a guy is a dirtbag or not after a campaign, then you probably weren't paying attention. Or your guy is a diabolical genius, but that's pretty rare. If you're not going to pay enough attention to them to tell, then please, for the love of God, don't pollute the vote with your random guess.
And I have no idea what point you're trying to make when you're obviously disagreeing with the concept of voting based on an individual rather than closing your eyes and voting for a loosely-defined group while also pointing out that the party system in the US is broken.
Or humans, but we grade on a curve.
It makes no sense to differentiate between the two anymore.
It never did. If you're voting for a party, you're a moron. Vote for people, not parties. There are good ones and awful ones in all of them.
"Word got around that the copied textbooks weren't such a great deal after all and by the end of the semester the store that sold them was out of business."
Where's the little picture of Captain Copyright standing outside the burnt-out building with a gas can?
The Google guys must laugh their asses off about this stuff. Either that, or it's a kind of public brainstorming. "Okay, nobody came up with anything especially cool for gbrowser, let's register googlebeans and see if anybody comes up with a product we can sell."
The rest is open source and you can't pirate that.
That sounds like a challenge, and I accept.
You're attributing far too much power to a single bit of BS. I'm sure if you quizzed kids on ID, they'd fail that, too.
Good luck with that.
Now which issue was it that you deem unworthy? Was it one of these?
No, because, as I mentioned, I'm pretty sure it had something to do with construction. Though I could be wrong. It definitely wasn't any of those, though, since I've never been to any of those places.
Your advice to protestors to be forgettable seems unlikely to bring attention to their cause
I'm going to request as politely as possible that you learn to read before you respond. I never said anything like that.
That's an excellent list of examples of what can happen when jerks with a good cause get together to say with a unified, asshole voice what everyone was already else was already saying politely and constructively. I particularly like the one where they got together to protest gas prices by making people use more gas. That was swell of them.
Are you by chance a protest organizer?
That does sound like a good idea.
If so, the organization is almost certainly eager to have your contribution.
Same organization that creates dangerous situations for innocent people and costs thousands of dollars in lost productivity for people who had nothing to do with anything? 'Cause thanks, but no thanks.
All protests are inconvenient to somebody.
Yes, but let's just do our best to only make them inconvenient to whoever we're protesting against. I'm guessing we don't like them much anyway.
It seems to me that you are not the type to care about any protesters.
That is largely true, but only because they almost always preach to the choir, and by the time you get significant numbers of protestors, the choir is usually already singing pretty loudly.
So in other words don't protest at all.
A comprehensive guide to protesting was beyond the scope of my comment (as was accuracy, apparently. The picture doesn't show them handing things out, it shows them showing signs. Oops. My bad), but it should certainly not be taken as encouragement not to protest. Just protest better. Put some thought into whose mind you're trying to change and what the best way to do that might be. My personal favorite plan, to be implemented just as soon as I have a cause with co-supporters and some cash at the same time, is a protest party. Subsidize the beer, invite your supporters and those you hope to convince (with careful planning so as to ensure they're a minority), and let them mingle. Invite a reporter or two. Get the Foo Fighters to play, they'll support anything.
Kidding about the Foo Fighters. And obviously that's not a full plan, since there are some obvious (but solvable) problems in this synopsis form. But there's one suggestion.
Or do what you feel like, I'd just try real hard not to tick off any passing newspaper opinion writers is all, 'cause the ones that are there because they were sent by their press-masters will probably just scratch the surface of your issue when they're forced to report on it. The passer-by reporter might actually care.
And obviously, there are exceptions to everything I've said. Sometimes the shouting Bible guy works. I just wouldn't do it.
But when you are opposing a corrupt system of backscratchers that has more systemic power than you do, a dramatically tilted market, a gov't that gets paid to not care about the free market, and an apathetic/sheeplike populace
Persuasion tip #2: If you hope to be productive, under no circumstances use the words, "But when you are opposing a corrupt system of backscratchers that has more systemic power than you do, a dramatically tilted market, a gov't that gets paid to not care about the free market, and an apathetic/sheeplike populace." Or anything remotely resembling that.
The point of a protest is to get people to pay attention to your cause. If the press coverage of a protest is such that at least some people learn more about your cause than they knew before, then it can be considered a success.
We had a protest around here where a bunch of jerk-holes got together and stood on a five-lane highway during rush hour, blocking traffic for miles and miles, to protest something, I no longer remember what (a comment on the effectiveness of this crap on its own) (I think it had something to do with construction hiring or something). But I do remember it placed me squarely on the "screw those f***ers" side and by no means made me want to investigate the problem and form a reasoned opinion, and I wasn't even on that road that day.
That, of course, is a much crappier way to protest than bunny suits that don't block traffic, but they're still (in the picture, at least), handing out pamphlets to people who probably don't care and are going to be annoyed at the inconvenience.
So because I support the cause, here's a tip for aspiring protestors: Be unobtrusive (no assaulting strangers with pamphlets), be unrepetitive, be respectful, and be funny. Being liked is way more important than being right. If they like you, they'll look into your problem.
And please make sure you're actually funny if you're going for funny. Not-funny funny is worse than just standing in the commons and reading the Bible at the top of your lungs.
So obviously it didn't work the last 40000 times. 40001's the charm?
I liked that quote when I first heard it, and I liked it the next 241 times, and I still agree with it completely, but by now can we please modify Slashdot to auto-mod it to -1, Ultra-Redundant?
"A little box on the keyboard wire"? I'm sorry, but do you imagine Chinese intelligence to be run by 14-year-old pranksters that get their spy supplies at ThinkGeek?
there really isn't a real "Right to Privacy" in the Constitution
My comment here has nothing to do with anything, but why the hell not? Why is there less of a push for a privacy amendment than there is for a let-Arnold-run-for-president amendment? Frigging ridiculous. Someone with a law degree, or at least anyone more electable than an unemployed programmer, please get on top of that.
If we don't want the government to look over our shoulders, then we can't bitch when they didn't see something coming.
I bet we could if we tried real hard.
Obviously turning the "encrypted number" back into a real one would never slip from "a threat was found" to "we wanted to know who it was".
You're crapping on an effective means of controlling who gets access to data because there's a possibility it might not be used properly in some instances. If it's not used properly, then we have the situation we already are in. At the very least, we can file this under "better and under no circumstances worse."
Whether or not we can label it "good" is beyond the scope of me.