I think a more apt metaphor would be if I were to create a computer virus that dumped itself into commercial software that had been created by others, and then suing them for infringing on my copyrights.
It shouldn't be necessary because it should be against the law for parents to refuse basic vaccinations for their children. As an adult, you can choose to make all of the fuckwit decisions that you want for yourself, but you aren't free to make the same stupid and dangerous decisions for you children. In this instance, you aren't only harming your own child with your retarded decision, but you are placing a greater risk on EVERYONE ELSE. As no vaccine is 100% effective, it is crucial that a very large percentage of the population receive the vaccine for it to work properly. In short, I am glad that the doctors are starting to take a stand against this bullshit, because someone needs to.
You honestly think that it is okay for people to be thrown in jail for suggesting that the history of the second world war was not exactly as the books say that it is? Holocaust denial is totally batshit, and that is very easy to see. If you simply allow it to stand on its own merits, it will quickly cave under its own false pretenses. Putting people behind bars for it is inexcusable, I don't care what the history is, and it should not just be "up to the Germans". There is no freedom without free speech, and ignorant, hateful speech will always be at the frontiers of our freedom. Holocaust denial, racism, the Westboro Baptist Church and Cannibal Corpse are all the proverbial canary in the coal mine that is the state of our rights.
You miss the point. Can the Genesis story be interpreted allegorically? Sure, there is much in the text to suggest that it was never meant to be taken literally. My point is that, even as an allegory, it is a shitty story with a shitty message.
I don't care. If they don't check warrants, and they allow bullshit like this to pass through. Fuck them. Fuck their mothers, and fuck their fathers. There is no excuse for them to have been a part of this. They are knowingly making themselves accessories to the murder of a man who was simply expressing his opinion. As I said before, if all they do is blindly transmit the warrants, they don't have ANY reason to exist, they could be replaced by an Internet forum. If they DO check the warrants, then they failed miserably, and anybody involved ought to be tried and convicted for crimes against humanity. Fuck them. (Oh yeah, and double-fuck the Malaysians and the Saudis who are responsible for this sort of evil. I wish that Hell was real so that they could go there.)
This. Allah must be a sorry, sad little emo kid of a god if he is worried about what people are saying about him on Twitter. "Guys, stop talking about Muhammad on Twitter, we all know how sensitive Allah is -- he tried to overdose on Tylenol when that big bully in Denmark drew those cartoons!!"
Bring on the blasphemy, it's the only way we can fight this bullshit.
Dude, seriously? Sure, there are places in the world that are not in the Middle East that also repress speech. Should the Germans GTFO with their anti-speech laws? Of course they should. This does not, however, give the Muslim world a pass for their repression. This argument strikes me as one that a petulant toddler would make; "But Mom... Billy was playing in the mud too!!" It really rings hollow and adds very little to the conversation.
Maybe we should start translating science books into these new languages instead, so that the people get something that is of actual value, rather than more religious bullshit.
I grew up Christian, and was terrified of the proposition that there potentially was no God and no greater plan for me. Once I gave up the illusion, however, I found an amazing sense of freedom in the realization that there is no "master plan" for my life, and there is no preordained purpose in the world. All this meant to me was that it was up to me to create my own purpose, and to invent my own meaning. To me, this makes life infinitely more interesting and rewarding than just following the straight and narrow path that God and Jeebus set up for me.
Really? You clearly haven't read it then. It boils down to this:
God created intentionally created humans ignorant. God then commands humans not to become less ignorant. As humans were created ignorant by asshole God, they obviously can't know any better, so they eat the fruit and progress beyond their woefully subservient roots. God then condemns ALL OF HUMANKIND TO ETERNAL TORMENT BECAUSE TWO PEOPLE ATE A FUCKING APPLE.
Then, God decides that women need a little bit of extra punishment, because fuck women, that's why.
Shortly thereafter, this omnipotent, omniscient God KILLS EVERYTHING ON THE PLANET because, apparently, not even being all-powerful can keep you from cocking things up now and again.
Once humanity gets back on its feet, God sends his chosen people on a mission to ETHNICALLY CLEANSE the promised land, raping, pillaging, murdering, and basically committing every war crime we have on the book for a few hundred pages.
God then decides that the best way to save humanity is somehow to send himself down to Earth to be horrifically executed in public. He couldn't just, you, know, forgive us. Imagine if your dad decided that he was going to forgive you for crashing his car, but first you had to watch him brand himself with a hot poker, just for you. Pretty fucked up, right?
Even after all of this, the prime directive is still to worship the divine asshole dictator in the sky; you can spend your whole life treating everyone around you BETTER than you treat yourself, and you will still be cast into a lake of fire for not believing.
When you boil the Bible down to its basic essence, it is every bit as vile as Mein Kampf, if not more so. While there are some nice, happy little sayings in there, they do little to redeem the overwhelming monstrosity of the rest of the text.
Furthermore, it's not the recording engineer who squashes it like that. While they may squash individual instruments with compression, it is the mastering engineer who applies the overall limiting to the mix.
I would tentatively agree with you on this one. I say tentatively, because I do agree that when someone wants to do something entirely of their own volition, then it is not our place to say anything. Where this gets murky is where there is a culture of oppression. Case in point, the burqa. Many women claim that they choose to wear it voluntarily, but what does "choice" really mean when she will be perceived (and treated) as a whore if she doesn't wear it?
Yes, the story of The Jungle is a sad story in American History. While it did improve the meatpacking industry, the response by the average American had nothing to do with the deplorable treatment of the workers but "I am eating WHAT?!" People, at the end of the day, are only interested in their own personal self-interest. This is a sad, but true, fact that has haunted us through all of history.
This. I am so sick and tired of supposedly progressive people using tolerance to excuse horrific behaviors of other people around the globe. Yes, we do need to be tolerant of the cultures of others. If another culture wants to eat dogs, so what? We eat cows and pigs. Unfortunately, many people on the left, most of whom are otherwise quite intelligent and have very finely tuned moral compasses, take this argument WAY too far. Muslims want to force their women to dress in cloth bags? Heeey, who are we to say that we're better than they are? Tribes in Africa removing the clitorises of their little girls? Well, you know, they just do things a little bit differently... It is bullshit. We can (and need to) respect the rights of other cultures to do things in their own way, but that doesn't mean that there is no valid concept of universal morality. It is ALWAYS wrong to treat one gender/class/race as less than human. I don't care how many generations of your ancestors did it that way, or what your holy book says. This does not fall afoul of our need to respect cultural differences, it is simply a fulfillment of our obligation to our fellow human beings.
Are you retarded? I don't mean that as an insult, I just honestly feel that you may have some sort of mental deficiency to be spouting nonsense like that. We need to make them fear us more? When they have shown that they are willing to fly planes into buildings and strap bombs to their chests? You are talking about people for whom death is not an obstacle -- dying by our hand will only send them back to Allah. While we might be big and scary, we are never going to be bigger and scarier than Allah is to them. Unfortunately, there is really no simple answer as to what needs to be done in the Middle East. Even without our intervention, it would likely still be a big shitty mess, but we have done our best over the last half century or so to make it as shitty as possible for everyone involved. The animosity we have created will not go away any time soon, so just trying to be nice now will (understandably) ring quite hollow to these people. There may be some things that we can do to help them out, but at the end of the day, I think that the best we are going to be able to do is to board the windows and wait for the people to decide that they are sick of all the bullshit and create a free Middle East. I would even go so far as to say that we are seeing the beginning stages of it now, but it is still far too early to tell. Either way, trying to make them fear us will only make everything much, much worse.
You are simply deluded. For a candidate to get to the point where they are even a viable candidate in the primaries, they are already bought and paid for. I don't know how this problem can be fixed, but the corruption runs far too deep for it to be fixed at the voting booth.
With the amount of money that it takes to be a viable candidate for the office of the president of the United States, you can be sure that anyone you see on the ballot was bought and payed for long before you had any say in the matter. Couple this with the corporate collusion in media ownership to take care of 'outliers' (not that I agree with everything he says, but look at the time Ron Paul was given in debates in relation to his poll numbers), and you have a system where we really don't get a choice at all.
My friend, you are sorely mistaken if you think that money is the only card on the table in the SOPA debate. If it was only about money, Google and Facebook would lobby the **AA's into oblivion, as their pockets are so much deeper that it wouldn't even be a contest. SOPA is not even about copyright; it's about control. By writing such an overly broad rule, the government assures that all sites on the web are in violation of the law at all times. While the vast majority of sites would be assumed to be acting in good faith to prevent infringement, anyone who steps out of line can immediately be wiped out with no due process. Wikileaks and the Occupy movement have showed the Congress critters that an unregulated Internet will eventually bring all of their greed and corruption into the light of day, and that people will only tolerate it for so long. They NEED something like SOPA to reign it back and, so that they can continue fucking the people without worry of being taken to task for it.
This doesn't seem to stop that; you can still exchange phone numbers and personal email addresses with co-workers if you would like to collaborate on projects outside of work hours. Shutting down the official company mail server sends a very clear, and very much needed message; you can leave work at work if you so choose. It isn't healthy to have your job chase you home; if you choose to do that I am not in the least upset, but there does need to be official motions put in place to stop the encroachment of work on personal life.
This is such a common fallacy -- we would expect an AI driver to be fucking perfect before we would ever call it "safe". Sure, they will have bugs, and people will die. But they will have nowhere near as many bugs as the meat computer that we have in our heads. Amazing as it is, the human brain is simply not meant for the types of tasks that we often apply it to, and as such, tens of thousands of people die on the road each year. Even if the adoption of driverless cars cut that down to 1% of the current death rate, people would still be screaming about the cars killing us. George Carlin was right; some people are really fuckin' stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a more apt metaphor would be if I were to create a computer virus that dumped itself into commercial software that had been created by others, and then suing them for infringing on my copyrights.
It shouldn't be necessary because it should be against the law for parents to refuse basic vaccinations for their children. As an adult, you can choose to make all of the fuckwit decisions that you want for yourself, but you aren't free to make the same stupid and dangerous decisions for you children. In this instance, you aren't only harming your own child with your retarded decision, but you are placing a greater risk on EVERYONE ELSE. As no vaccine is 100% effective, it is crucial that a very large percentage of the population receive the vaccine for it to work properly. In short, I am glad that the doctors are starting to take a stand against this bullshit, because someone needs to.
You honestly think that it is okay for people to be thrown in jail for suggesting that the history of the second world war was not exactly as the books say that it is? Holocaust denial is totally batshit, and that is very easy to see. If you simply allow it to stand on its own merits, it will quickly cave under its own false pretenses. Putting people behind bars for it is inexcusable, I don't care what the history is, and it should not just be "up to the Germans". There is no freedom without free speech, and ignorant, hateful speech will always be at the frontiers of our freedom. Holocaust denial, racism, the Westboro Baptist Church and Cannibal Corpse are all the proverbial canary in the coal mine that is the state of our rights.
You miss the point. Can the Genesis story be interpreted allegorically? Sure, there is much in the text to suggest that it was never meant to be taken literally. My point is that, even as an allegory, it is a shitty story with a shitty message.
I don't care. If they don't check warrants, and they allow bullshit like this to pass through. Fuck them. Fuck their mothers, and fuck their fathers. There is no excuse for them to have been a part of this. They are knowingly making themselves accessories to the murder of a man who was simply expressing his opinion. As I said before, if all they do is blindly transmit the warrants, they don't have ANY reason to exist, they could be replaced by an Internet forum. If they DO check the warrants, then they failed miserably, and anybody involved ought to be tried and convicted for crimes against humanity. Fuck them. (Oh yeah, and double-fuck the Malaysians and the Saudis who are responsible for this sort of evil. I wish that Hell was real so that they could go there.)
FUCK YOU I WOULD IF I COULD
This. Allah must be a sorry, sad little emo kid of a god if he is worried about what people are saying about him on Twitter. "Guys, stop talking about Muhammad on Twitter, we all know how sensitive Allah is -- he tried to overdose on Tylenol when that big bully in Denmark drew those cartoons!!"
Bring on the blasphemy, it's the only way we can fight this bullshit.
Dude, seriously? Sure, there are places in the world that are not in the Middle East that also repress speech. Should the Germans GTFO with their anti-speech laws? Of course they should. This does not, however, give the Muslim world a pass for their repression. This argument strikes me as one that a petulant toddler would make; "But Mom... Billy was playing in the mud too!!" It really rings hollow and adds very little to the conversation.
FMAI (Fisherman's Association of Israel): WTF PIRACY
Maybe we should start translating science books into these new languages instead, so that the people get something that is of actual value, rather than more religious bullshit.
I grew up Christian, and was terrified of the proposition that there potentially was no God and no greater plan for me. Once I gave up the illusion, however, I found an amazing sense of freedom in the realization that there is no "master plan" for my life, and there is no preordained purpose in the world. All this meant to me was that it was up to me to create my own purpose, and to invent my own meaning. To me, this makes life infinitely more interesting and rewarding than just following the straight and narrow path that God and Jeebus set up for me.
Really? You clearly haven't read it then. It boils down to this:
God created intentionally created humans ignorant. God then commands humans not to become less ignorant. As humans were created ignorant by asshole God, they obviously can't know any better, so they eat the fruit and progress beyond their woefully subservient roots. God then condemns ALL OF HUMANKIND TO ETERNAL TORMENT BECAUSE TWO PEOPLE ATE A FUCKING APPLE.
Then, God decides that women need a little bit of extra punishment, because fuck women, that's why.
Shortly thereafter, this omnipotent, omniscient God KILLS EVERYTHING ON THE PLANET because, apparently, not even being all-powerful can keep you from cocking things up now and again.
Once humanity gets back on its feet, God sends his chosen people on a mission to ETHNICALLY CLEANSE the promised land, raping, pillaging, murdering, and basically committing every war crime we have on the book for a few hundred pages.
God then decides that the best way to save humanity is somehow to send himself down to Earth to be horrifically executed in public. He couldn't just, you, know, forgive us. Imagine if your dad decided that he was going to forgive you for crashing his car, but first you had to watch him brand himself with a hot poker, just for you. Pretty fucked up, right?
Even after all of this, the prime directive is still to worship the divine asshole dictator in the sky; you can spend your whole life treating everyone around you BETTER than you treat yourself, and you will still be cast into a lake of fire for not believing.
When you boil the Bible down to its basic essence, it is every bit as vile as Mein Kampf, if not more so. While there are some nice, happy little sayings in there, they do little to redeem the overwhelming monstrosity of the rest of the text.
Furthermore, it's not the recording engineer who squashes it like that. While they may squash individual instruments with compression, it is the mastering engineer who applies the overall limiting to the mix.
I would say more like 99.999999%...
I would tentatively agree with you on this one. I say tentatively, because I do agree that when someone wants to do something entirely of their own volition, then it is not our place to say anything. Where this gets murky is where there is a culture of oppression. Case in point, the burqa. Many women claim that they choose to wear it voluntarily, but what does "choice" really mean when she will be perceived (and treated) as a whore if she doesn't wear it?
Yes, the story of The Jungle is a sad story in American History. While it did improve the meatpacking industry, the response by the average American had nothing to do with the deplorable treatment of the workers but "I am eating WHAT?!" People, at the end of the day, are only interested in their own personal self-interest. This is a sad, but true, fact that has haunted us through all of history.
This. I am so sick and tired of supposedly progressive people using tolerance to excuse horrific behaviors of other people around the globe. Yes, we do need to be tolerant of the cultures of others. If another culture wants to eat dogs, so what? We eat cows and pigs. Unfortunately, many people on the left, most of whom are otherwise quite intelligent and have very finely tuned moral compasses, take this argument WAY too far. Muslims want to force their women to dress in cloth bags? Heeey, who are we to say that we're better than they are? Tribes in Africa removing the clitorises of their little girls? Well, you know, they just do things a little bit differently... It is bullshit. We can (and need to) respect the rights of other cultures to do things in their own way, but that doesn't mean that there is no valid concept of universal morality. It is ALWAYS wrong to treat one gender/class/race as less than human. I don't care how many generations of your ancestors did it that way, or what your holy book says. This does not fall afoul of our need to respect cultural differences, it is simply a fulfillment of our obligation to our fellow human beings.
Are you retarded? I don't mean that as an insult, I just honestly feel that you may have some sort of mental deficiency to be spouting nonsense like that. We need to make them fear us more? When they have shown that they are willing to fly planes into buildings and strap bombs to their chests? You are talking about people for whom death is not an obstacle -- dying by our hand will only send them back to Allah. While we might be big and scary, we are never going to be bigger and scarier than Allah is to them. Unfortunately, there is really no simple answer as to what needs to be done in the Middle East. Even without our intervention, it would likely still be a big shitty mess, but we have done our best over the last half century or so to make it as shitty as possible for everyone involved. The animosity we have created will not go away any time soon, so just trying to be nice now will (understandably) ring quite hollow to these people. There may be some things that we can do to help them out, but at the end of the day, I think that the best we are going to be able to do is to board the windows and wait for the people to decide that they are sick of all the bullshit and create a free Middle East. I would even go so far as to say that we are seeing the beginning stages of it now, but it is still far too early to tell. Either way, trying to make them fear us will only make everything much, much worse.
You are simply deluded. For a candidate to get to the point where they are even a viable candidate in the primaries, they are already bought and paid for. I don't know how this problem can be fixed, but the corruption runs far too deep for it to be fixed at the voting booth.
With the amount of money that it takes to be a viable candidate for the office of the president of the United States, you can be sure that anyone you see on the ballot was bought and payed for long before you had any say in the matter. Couple this with the corporate collusion in media ownership to take care of 'outliers' (not that I agree with everything he says, but look at the time Ron Paul was given in debates in relation to his poll numbers), and you have a system where we really don't get a choice at all.
My friend, you are sorely mistaken if you think that money is the only card on the table in the SOPA debate. If it was only about money, Google and Facebook would lobby the **AA's into oblivion, as their pockets are so much deeper that it wouldn't even be a contest. SOPA is not even about copyright; it's about control. By writing such an overly broad rule, the government assures that all sites on the web are in violation of the law at all times. While the vast majority of sites would be assumed to be acting in good faith to prevent infringement, anyone who steps out of line can immediately be wiped out with no due process. Wikileaks and the Occupy movement have showed the Congress critters that an unregulated Internet will eventually bring all of their greed and corruption into the light of day, and that people will only tolerate it for so long. They NEED something like SOPA to reign it back and, so that they can continue fucking the people without worry of being taken to task for it.
This doesn't seem to stop that; you can still exchange phone numbers and personal email addresses with co-workers if you would like to collaborate on projects outside of work hours. Shutting down the official company mail server sends a very clear, and very much needed message; you can leave work at work if you so choose. It isn't healthy to have your job chase you home; if you choose to do that I am not in the least upset, but there does need to be official motions put in place to stop the encroachment of work on personal life.
Yes, you are correct. Things are more secure when they are inaccessible. Also, cars are less likely to be stolen when they have no tires or engines.
That's why you need to be careful when overcocking...
This is such a common fallacy -- we would expect an AI driver to be fucking perfect before we would ever call it "safe". Sure, they will have bugs, and people will die. But they will have nowhere near as many bugs as the meat computer that we have in our heads. Amazing as it is, the human brain is simply not meant for the types of tasks that we often apply it to, and as such, tens of thousands of people die on the road each year. Even if the adoption of driverless cars cut that down to 1% of the current death rate, people would still be screaming about the cars killing us. George Carlin was right; some people are really fuckin' stupid.