The FBI already contacted him to tell him to knock it off. Now all they have to do is legally detain him for 72 hours during the 9/11 window and the book burning is off. I can think of a hundred ways they could do this. It's not a long stretch of "reasonable doubt" to assume this guy is a menace to society. Put him on ice for a while and let the foaming-at-the-mouth masses cool off a little. Problem solved.
You misunderstand the point of the first amendment, and the founders' conception of rights. The first amendment does not GRANT rights; it merely acknowledges that the right to free speech exists, and constrains the federal government (and by the 14th amendment, state governments) from violating the right. Individuals, and corporations, can violate people's right to free speech without running afoul of the first amendment, because the rights are PRIOR to the constitution, and are inalienable.
You are thus conflating the "first amendment" as the source of free speech rights. It is not, at least under the American view of rights. Sadly, you've been modded informative, which means many Slashdot readers are ignorant of the basic Enlightenment philosophy underlying American law.
Ding, Ding, Ding! We have a winner. The Bill of Rights almost didn't happen precisely because the founders of the Constitution believed all rights were vested in the people inherently. Thus, the purpose of the constitution was to specify what rights the government had. Everything else (including free speech) belongs to the people.
No one has to provide a stage??? Then why does even/. cover the story? News for nerds, stuff that matters! Damnit, the story is everywhere! What do you mean "no one has to providing a stage"? Everyone is providing a stage!
Let me summarize the story for you:
- A guy, who normally gets attention from no more than 50 people wants to burn some holy books.
- About 200 guys on the other side of the planet reply by burning a flag.
Now move along, move along - there's nothing to see here!
Wouldn't it be nice to be so simplistic? The truth is, the media lives to run stories like this because people (us!) eat it up. Even without the sensationalism, there's all kinds of interesting aspects of this story like the dingbats debating free speech above this thread, and the other dingbats talking about which religion is more extreme. This sucker is an avalanche and now that it's going, there's no stopping it.
He's just burning some books. Our soldiers are being attacked because they are occupying peoples' homes and supporting a new government they don't all accept. The argument that burning these books would put our soldiers in more danger is not only incorrect, but irrelevant as here we are...giving up our rights and freedoms because we fear the terrorists. Another victory for fundies.
Talk about gross oversimplification. Our soldiers are being attacked because the people they displaced from power want it back. Oh, by the way, the people we displaced from power are Islamic Extremists, who deny basic education to women, recruit children into their armies, and are all around bad guys. The "regular" people of Afghanistan are all too happy to be out from the thumb of the Taliban. Not that our actions have been overtly friendly with civilians as of late, but that's the cost of a guerrilla war.
There are over 1 billion Muslims in the world, and several million living in the Western world. What percentage of them will resort to violence as a form of protest when these books are burned? Even a few thousand people is several orders of magnitude less than 1%. So it's hardly representative of the Muslim world. In a similar vein, Christians burnt down the Saint Michel theater in Paris, putting 13 people in hospital, just to protest against the film "The Last Temptation of Christ", so it's hardly like Islam has a monopoly on its followers wanting to restrict freedom of speech. (The Bible actually insists that blasphemers" should be killed by Christian congregations: "And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying... he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him.")
The problem with that statement is that Mosaic law doesn't (read: shouldn't) apply to Christians. Most of the Old Testament laws were obsoleted by Christ. See the Sermon on the Mount for a non-comprehensive list. While I certainly don't agree with the Paris theater burning fiasco, I also don't follow that the Bible encourages such action, if read properly.
I know that confuses things, but that's how it works. You want to do business here? Well, you've got to obey our laws. And our laws mean for Iran not have this technology.
That's logical enough, but it only works if the law actually states that it's illegal to withhold that specific technology from Iran. Is it?
Simple answer: It's too easy to hate. Scouting has been labeled as "gay haters" and "pro religion zealots" in the minds of the masses. For those of us who know scouting, we understand things differently. Any institution that sets itself up as "moral" will inevitably fall under attack. Just ask the Mormons (who are also scouters).
Yeah, don't leave the house for an entire week and make all your family members do the same. Sounds intelligent and very likely to happen. Or be respectful of your neighbors, take advantage of modern medicine and get the flu shot.
That's what my company policy is. If you're sick, stay home. That's also what my doctor tells me to do when I'm sick and I usually ride it out just fine. I'm not saying "Flu shot is teh evil!" My philosophy is that the flu isn't so bad for most people and getting the flu shot (for me) is a risk vector to getting other infectious diseases and compromising my immune system. The one time I did get the flu shot, I did so with eight other people. Within a week, all eight of us had the worst case of the flu we'd ever had before or since. Coincidence? I'm not willing to bet on it again.
Mod me down more if you want, but I find it really disturbing that many slashdot readers disagree with the medical advice of the CDC and mainstream doctors on this topic. In the last 15 years, there have been less than 30,000 adverse reactions to flu shots and most of those have been mild things like hives. Meanwhile more than 30,000 people die each year from the flu and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized, costing our country millions.
I know you're using my reply to sound off to the mods who dinged you, but if you want to debate cost, here's something to chew on. The millions in health care cost for treating the flu is at least partially offset by the cost of developing, manufacturing, and administering the vaccine. Walgreens is charging $25 for the shot, so if we do some back of the envelope estimating, that's $250 million for 10 million doses (3% of the US population). I don't have any figures for flu-related health care costs, but I bet if we did, they'd be similar. Cost is a non issue.
Fearmongering BS is when you are afraid to get the flu shot because you think you will die. This forum is supposed to be a place for people who are up to date on science and technology, not people who are afraid of it. You want to live "naturally?" People used to do that in the 1400's and the average lifespan was 50.
Again, I see that you're lumping me in with the "them" that truely fear the flu shot. And while I don't subscribe to that fear, I think they have some valid arguments, the OP's linked study being one of them. Vaccines are fine and good for eliminating diseases generally, but there needs to be moderation. Vaccines for things like chicken pox are heading down a slope that is more about wholesale control of nature by man than it is about protecting people and saving lives. When does it stop? I agree that the flu shot has it's purpose. The elderly and other groups where the benefit out weighs the risk should consider it. Just because the CDC says something, doesn't mean it's true. Living in the real world means knowing that everybody else is just as flawed as you are and goverment agencies doubly so.
The choice is clear, sluggish native apps are becoming obsolete, and lightweight online apps are becoming more and more reliable. And when you only use these kind of netapps, why bother installing a bloated OS. This might just be the next revolution in the netbook industry.
Until fast, reliable, wireless internet access is available 24/7 in 90+% of the industrialized world, web-based OSes will never penetrate the market far enough to displace Microsoft. Why bother installing a bloated OS? Because it runs my stuff (games/cad/graphic design/etc) offline. More to the point, the target hardward for this is netbooks, which means crappy, slow, small SSD drives. Limited storage means they will want to GoogleDocs my data, which means I have to have internet to get my data, which means it has to be fast, because my 1.5 GB cad drawing loads slow on gigabit networks and an 8 core portable workstation. Yeah, they're not necessarily targeting the power users (for now), but it illustrates the point that this OS is naturally limited by multiple factors. Add to that the fact that Microsoft won't give up market share quietly and Windows 7 is a disaster in the making... we'll see a lot of turbulence in the portable market for years to come. End result may be positive, if Microsoft is pressured into performance (much like Intel was back before the Phenom days). Personally, I don't see a GoogOS making that much of a splash.
That's a great idea, but far too ethereal for management in a corporation of any size.
I work for a large multinational company that has 500,000 plus employees. Our IT infrastructure is huge and the unwieldly management put in charge of it cannot get their hands or heads around what we actually do. Their answer is to count the number of tickets we open, not close. They have to have something that's measurable. Tickets that were never opened can't be counted, so they choose the former and the rank and file IT workers suffer for it. It's completely pointless to spend thirty seconds rebooting a printer, or clicking on an error message for a user that's too traumatized by adware to do it themselves, than to waste ten minutes to fill out the fifty fields that are required for the trouble ticket. Especially because I've got ten more people with similar problems waiting in the wings. By the time I get a chance to enter in any ticket, it's going to be for the guy that took an hour to track down the correct version of Java to run the obscure app on an ancient Intranet site that is only required once a year. How am I supposed to remember every Tom, Dick, and Harry that can't be bothered to replace a toner cartridge?
Even though we are understaffed to the point where we can't put in all our tickets, the very fact that our "numbers" are down translates into a bunch of deaf ears when we plead for help. "You only closed five tickets a day in March, so you can't possibly be that busy." To the OP: Whatever method you pick, good luck. Pray for sanity to descend upon the clueless managers whose sole job is to run reports and go to meetings. My sanity depends on it.
It's true that TRIM is very much in it's infancy, but the clouds aren't as dark in SSD's future as they once were (even as little as a month ago). Many, many, many companies see SSD's as the future of storage and I'm inclined to agree with them. With that kind of muscle propelling development and increased consumer interest fuelling funding, the landscape is and will continue to change very rapidly.
My own take on things, FWIW, is that tapes will go the way of the floppy and spinning disks will become near-term storage for most enterprises. Look for SSD's to become mainstream SAN devices, especially as hardware manufacturers remove the driver/OS hurdle and present SAN devices as "just another disk". And as SSD's mature, I expect the performance gap between DRAM and SSD's to shrink quite a lot.
Actually, my SSD (firmware 1.10) supports TRIM and I've used it with good results. OCZ is one of the two companies mentioned that is working on a TRIM solution, but you should also know, that Windows 7 definitely supports TRIM. Google is your friend.
But seriously, how many sniper's actually fire in the dark? Isn't it kinda hard to see your target at night?
Do I really have to say it? I mean, night vision goggles have been the staple of FPS fair since Quake 2.... They're so effective, they make filters that fit on standard sniper scopes and even dedicated night vision rifle scopes.
The Apostles followed the Torah, which had some of the Old Testament in it, but the "Bible" as we know it, even just the Old Testament portion didn't exist back then. It wasn't a translation, as it was written in their own language.
But if we agree that "those who follow the bible" are Christian, then you must see that Mormons are not Christians.
I don't agree on that definition of Christianity. How about this one: "Those who follow Christ". That sounds much better to my ears.
By your definition, the Apostles (Peter, James, John, et. al) are not Christians because the Bible didn't exist as we have it until long after their death. How could they follow a book that hadn't even been written yet? That doesn't even take into account the thousands of Christians that lived and died after the Apostles death but didn't have the bible because it wasn't available to them. I don't mind being lumped in with that company.
Uhh, Christianity is very distinctly monotheistic.
I'll take you up on this one. According to whose definition is Christianity monotheistic? Where did the notion come from? You didn't come up with it. The Bible didn't either, so don't try to pass it off on a book. The Bible contains the word of God, but isn't the end all be all of knowledge and wisdom. Or perhaps you would rather stick to one point of difference between what the LDS believe is true Christianity and accepted, modern, "mainstream" Christianity?
It's well known that Smith dictated the first version of the Mormon doctrine while reading it from a stone in his hat, with the hat placed over his face. When his associates (presumably skeptical) wife stole that copy and wouldn't give it back, Smith had to start over. Of course this time he dictated something different (presumably because he couldn't remember exactly what it was he said on the previous pass), which he explained as being a translation from a different set of documents.
"Well known" gets the raw deal here. Your account sounds strange, indeed, but the truth is that the Book of Mormon (your "first version of Mormon Doctrine") was translated with a Urim and Thummim (which has nothing to do with a hat, mind you). The lost manuscript (as the copy given to Martin Harris' wife is referred to) was deliberately not re-translated. If you read it, you'll find out that the original authors, Lehi and Nephi gave similar accounts of the same events precisely because this scenario was predicted.
Mormon history is great stuff, and it doesn't bother most Mormons in the least. This is because they figure that where it came from doesn't matter, as long as when they pray their god tells them it's all good.
Nope. Mormons believe because of... faith. It's a diminishing attribute in our modern world, but it can be found among people of all different walks of life. Even scientists. Mormon history is indeed great stuff, but as with all other religious history, looking at it with an eye of faith changes how that knowledge affects you. History doesn't change because "most people" think it's a bunch of hooey.
Being a Christian (and pretty well educated about the origin of the LDS) I very much commend them for the work they do, but pity them for the screwed up nature of their beliefs. Make no mistake, LDS/Mormans are not Christians. Similar values, though. There is a lot of easy to obtain info and such if you're interested. I'm not trying to flame or troll. Ask one, they don't typically associate themselves with your 'typical' Christians.
This and this are pretty good writeups on how the LDS church is and is not "Christian". The LDS church maintains that it follows the teachings of Jesus Christ and is therefore, Christian. It also believes that it is not aligned with so-called "mainstream" Christianity because of the "screwed up nature of [our] beliefs". While you and I probably don't agree on the nature of the trinity (as one example) it doesn't make you a Christian and me not. It just means we have a different idea of what being a Christian means.
BZZZZT. Wrongo, Tex. The "Mormons" in El Dorado weren't the same religion as the "Mormons" in the OP. Get your facts straight before you start slinging mud around here. And speaking of which, "well-documented fraudster" is easy to say as an AC. What say you walk around that cloak of secrecy and provide some first hand accounts of Joseph Smith's fraud?
You're forgetting the nuclear option. Bush already a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_doctrine">reversed US policy on Preemption. It's a slippery slope from there to lobbing a few nukes from a B-2 to slam the door on Iran. All it takes is political will or religious fanaticism.
Slashdot Mirror
The FBI already contacted him to tell him to knock it off. Now all they have to do is legally detain him for 72 hours during the 9/11 window and the book burning is off. I can think of a hundred ways they could do this. It's not a long stretch of "reasonable doubt" to assume this guy is a menace to society. Put him on ice for a while and let the foaming-at-the-mouth masses cool off a little. Problem solved.
You misunderstand the point of the first amendment, and the founders' conception of rights. The first amendment does not GRANT rights; it merely acknowledges that the right to free speech exists, and constrains the federal government (and by the 14th amendment, state governments) from violating the right. Individuals, and corporations, can violate people's right to free speech without running afoul of the first amendment, because the rights are PRIOR to the constitution, and are inalienable.
You are thus conflating the "first amendment" as the source of free speech rights. It is not, at least under the American view of rights. Sadly, you've been modded informative, which means many Slashdot readers are ignorant of the basic Enlightenment philosophy underlying American law.
Ding, Ding, Ding! We have a winner. The Bill of Rights almost didn't happen precisely because the founders of the Constitution believed all rights were vested in the people inherently. Thus, the purpose of the constitution was to specify what rights the government had. Everything else (including free speech) belongs to the people.
No one has to provide a stage??? Then why does even /. cover the story? News for nerds, stuff that matters! Damnit, the story is everywhere! What do you mean "no one has to providing a stage"? Everyone is providing a stage!
Let me summarize the story for you: - A guy, who normally gets attention from no more than 50 people wants to burn some holy books. - About 200 guys on the other side of the planet reply by burning a flag.
Now move along, move along - there's nothing to see here!
Wouldn't it be nice to be so simplistic? The truth is, the media lives to run stories like this because people (us!) eat it up. Even without the sensationalism, there's all kinds of interesting aspects of this story like the dingbats debating free speech above this thread, and the other dingbats talking about which religion is more extreme. This sucker is an avalanche and now that it's going, there's no stopping it.
He's just burning some books. Our soldiers are being attacked because they are occupying peoples' homes and supporting a new government they don't all accept. The argument that burning these books would put our soldiers in more danger is not only incorrect, but irrelevant as here we are...giving up our rights and freedoms because we fear the terrorists. Another victory for fundies.
Talk about gross oversimplification. Our soldiers are being attacked because the people they displaced from power want it back. Oh, by the way, the people we displaced from power are Islamic Extremists, who deny basic education to women, recruit children into their armies, and are all around bad guys. The "regular" people of Afghanistan are all too happy to be out from the thumb of the Taliban. Not that our actions have been overtly friendly with civilians as of late, but that's the cost of a guerrilla war.
There are over 1 billion Muslims in the world, and several million living in the Western world. What percentage of them will resort to violence as a form of protest when these books are burned? Even a few thousand people is several orders of magnitude less than 1%. So it's hardly representative of the Muslim world. In a similar vein, Christians burnt down the Saint Michel theater in Paris, putting 13 people in hospital, just to protest against the film "The Last Temptation of Christ", so it's hardly like Islam has a monopoly on its followers wanting to restrict freedom of speech. (The Bible actually insists that blasphemers" should be killed by Christian congregations: "And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying ... he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him.")
The problem with that statement is that Mosaic law doesn't (read: shouldn't) apply to Christians. Most of the Old Testament laws were obsoleted by Christ. See the Sermon on the Mount for a non-comprehensive list. While I certainly don't agree with the Paris theater burning fiasco, I also don't follow that the Bible encourages such action, if read properly.
Otherwise known as... Slashdotted. I hope their ISP doesn't put the hammer down on them.
Woooooosh!
In the country where Siemens is doing business.
I know that confuses things, but that's how it works. You want to do business here? Well, you've got to obey our laws. And our laws mean for Iran not have this technology.
That's logical enough, but it only works if the law actually states that it's illegal to withhold that specific technology from Iran. Is it?
Thank you for making my point so eloquently.
Where's the "HUZZAH"?
Simple answer: It's too easy to hate. Scouting has been labeled as "gay haters" and "pro religion zealots" in the minds of the masses. For those of us who know scouting, we understand things differently. Any institution that sets itself up as "moral" will inevitably fall under attack. Just ask the Mormons (who are also scouters).
Oh, and HUZZAH!
Yeah, don't leave the house for an entire week and make all your family members do the same. Sounds intelligent and very likely to happen. Or be respectful of your neighbors, take advantage of modern medicine and get the flu shot.
That's what my company policy is. If you're sick, stay home. That's also what my doctor tells me to do when I'm sick and I usually ride it out just fine. I'm not saying "Flu shot is teh evil!" My philosophy is that the flu isn't so bad for most people and getting the flu shot (for me) is a risk vector to getting other infectious diseases and compromising my immune system. The one time I did get the flu shot, I did so with eight other people. Within a week, all eight of us had the worst case of the flu we'd ever had before or since. Coincidence? I'm not willing to bet on it again.
Mod me down more if you want, but I find it really disturbing that many slashdot readers disagree with the medical advice of the CDC and mainstream doctors on this topic. In the last 15 years, there have been less than 30,000 adverse reactions to flu shots and most of those have been mild things like hives. Meanwhile more than 30,000 people die each year from the flu and hundreds of thousands more are hospitalized, costing our country millions.
I know you're using my reply to sound off to the mods who dinged you, but if you want to debate cost, here's something to chew on. The millions in health care cost for treating the flu is at least partially offset by the cost of developing, manufacturing, and administering the vaccine. Walgreens is charging $25 for the shot, so if we do some back of the envelope estimating, that's $250 million for 10 million doses (3% of the US population). I don't have any figures for flu-related health care costs, but I bet if we did, they'd be similar. Cost is a non issue.
Fearmongering BS is when you are afraid to get the flu shot because you think you will die. This forum is supposed to be a place for people who are up to date on science and technology, not people who are afraid of it. You want to live "naturally?" People used to do that in the 1400's and the average lifespan was 50.
Again, I see that you're lumping me in with the "them" that truely fear the flu shot. And while I don't subscribe to that fear, I think they have some valid arguments, the OP's linked study being one of them. Vaccines are fine and good for eliminating diseases generally, but there needs to be moderation. Vaccines for things like chicken pox are heading down a slope that is more about wholesale control of nature by man than it is about protecting people and saving lives. When does it stop? I agree that the flu shot has it's purpose. The elderly and other groups where the benefit out weighs the risk should consider it. Just because the CDC says something, doesn't mean it's true. Living in the real world means knowing that everybody else is just as flawed as you are and goverment agencies doubly so.
But when you are walking around sick and infectious for a few days, you stand the chance of infecting some people who have weakened immune systems...
So don't walk around... Stay at home and ride the flu out. Problem solved and the rest of your post is just fearmongering BS.
snip
The choice is clear, sluggish native apps are becoming obsolete, and lightweight online apps are becoming more and more reliable. And when you only use these kind of netapps, why bother installing a bloated OS. This might just be the next revolution in the netbook industry.
Until fast, reliable, wireless internet access is available 24/7 in 90+% of the industrialized world, web-based OSes will never penetrate the market far enough to displace Microsoft. Why bother installing a bloated OS? Because it runs my stuff (games/cad/graphic design/etc) offline. More to the point, the target hardward for this is netbooks, which means crappy, slow, small SSD drives. Limited storage means they will want to GoogleDocs my data, which means I have to have internet to get my data, which means it has to be fast, because my 1.5 GB cad drawing loads slow on gigabit networks and an 8 core portable workstation. Yeah, they're not necessarily targeting the power users (for now), but it illustrates the point that this OS is naturally limited by multiple factors. Add to that the fact that Microsoft won't give up market share quietly and Windows 7 is a disaster in the making... we'll see a lot of turbulence in the portable market for years to come. End result may be positive, if Microsoft is pressured into performance (much like Intel was back before the Phenom days). Personally, I don't see a GoogOS making that much of a splash.
That's a great idea, but far too ethereal for management in a corporation of any size.
I work for a large multinational company that has 500,000 plus employees. Our IT infrastructure is huge and the unwieldly management put in charge of it cannot get their hands or heads around what we actually do. Their answer is to count the number of tickets we open, not close. They have to have something that's measurable. Tickets that were never opened can't be counted, so they choose the former and the rank and file IT workers suffer for it. It's completely pointless to spend thirty seconds rebooting a printer, or clicking on an error message for a user that's too traumatized by adware to do it themselves, than to waste ten minutes to fill out the fifty fields that are required for the trouble ticket. Especially because I've got ten more people with similar problems waiting in the wings. By the time I get a chance to enter in any ticket, it's going to be for the guy that took an hour to track down the correct version of Java to run the obscure app on an ancient Intranet site that is only required once a year. How am I supposed to remember every Tom, Dick, and Harry that can't be bothered to replace a toner cartridge?
Even though we are understaffed to the point where we can't put in all our tickets, the very fact that our "numbers" are down translates into a bunch of deaf ears when we plead for help. "You only closed five tickets a day in March, so you can't possibly be that busy." To the OP: Whatever method you pick, good luck. Pray for sanity to descend upon the clueless managers whose sole job is to run reports and go to meetings. My sanity depends on it.
It's true that TRIM is very much in it's infancy, but the clouds aren't as dark in SSD's future as they once were (even as little as a month ago). Many, many, many companies see SSD's as the future of storage and I'm inclined to agree with them. With that kind of muscle propelling development and increased consumer interest fuelling funding, the landscape is and will continue to change very rapidly.
My own take on things, FWIW, is that tapes will go the way of the floppy and spinning disks will become near-term storage for most enterprises. Look for SSD's to become mainstream SAN devices, especially as hardware manufacturers remove the driver/OS hurdle and present SAN devices as "just another disk". And as SSD's mature, I expect the performance gap between DRAM and SSD's to shrink quite a lot.
Actually, my SSD (firmware 1.10) supports TRIM and I've used it with good results. OCZ is one of the two companies mentioned that is working on a TRIM solution, but you should also know, that Windows 7 definitely supports TRIM. Google is your friend.
But seriously, how many sniper's actually fire in the dark? Isn't it kinda hard to see your target at night?
Do I really have to say it? I mean, night vision goggles have been the staple of FPS fair since Quake 2.... They're so effective, they make filters that fit on standard sniper scopes and even dedicated night vision rifle scopes.
Well, according to his brother, there was no hat (unless the hat was somehow suspended in mid air).
The Apostles followed the Torah, which had some of the Old Testament in it, but the "Bible" as we know it, even just the Old Testament portion didn't exist back then. It wasn't a translation, as it was written in their own language.
I don't agree on that definition of Christianity. How about this one: "Those who follow Christ". That sounds much better to my ears.
By your definition, the Apostles (Peter, James, John, et. al) are not Christians because the Bible didn't exist as we have it until long after their death. How could they follow a book that hadn't even been written yet? That doesn't even take into account the thousands of Christians that lived and died after the Apostles death but didn't have the bible because it wasn't available to them. I don't mind being lumped in with that company.
I'll take you up on this one. According to whose definition is Christianity monotheistic? Where did the notion come from? You didn't come up with it. The Bible didn't either, so don't try to pass it off on a book. The Bible contains the word of God, but isn't the end all be all of knowledge and wisdom. Or perhaps you would rather stick to one point of difference between what the LDS believe is true Christianity and accepted, modern, "mainstream" Christianity?
"Well known" gets the raw deal here. Your account sounds strange, indeed, but the truth is that the Book of Mormon (your "first version of Mormon Doctrine") was translated with a Urim and Thummim (which has nothing to do with a hat, mind you). The lost manuscript (as the copy given to Martin Harris' wife is referred to) was deliberately not re-translated. If you read it, you'll find out that the original authors, Lehi and Nephi gave similar accounts of the same events precisely because this scenario was predicted.
Nope. Mormons believe because of... faith. It's a diminishing attribute in our modern world, but it can be found among people of all different walks of life. Even scientists. Mormon history is indeed great stuff, but as with all other religious history, looking at it with an eye of faith changes how that knowledge affects you. History doesn't change because "most people" think it's a bunch of hooey.
This and this are pretty good writeups on how the LDS church is and is not "Christian". The LDS church maintains that it follows the teachings of Jesus Christ and is therefore, Christian. It also believes that it is not aligned with so-called "mainstream" Christianity because of the "screwed up nature of [our] beliefs". While you and I probably don't agree on the nature of the trinity (as one example) it doesn't make you a Christian and me not. It just means we have a different idea of what being a Christian means.
BZZZZT. Wrongo, Tex. The "Mormons" in El Dorado weren't the same religion as the "Mormons" in the OP. Get your facts straight before you start slinging mud around here. And speaking of which, "well-documented fraudster" is easy to say as an AC. What say you walk around that cloak of secrecy and provide some first hand accounts of Joseph Smith's fraud?
You're forgetting the nuclear option. Bush already a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_doctrine">reversed US policy on Preemption. It's a slippery slope from there to lobbing a few nukes from a B-2 to slam the door on Iran. All it takes is political will or religious fanaticism.