Passengers on flights coming from Willemstad into Amsterdam get checked 100%, because of the lax checks at Willemstad and the proportionally high amount of drug trafficking on this route.
Could do. I've never flown from Willemstad to Amsterdam, just Willemstad to Toronto. Actually, I've never flown to Amsterdam period... the handful of times I've been there (I have family in Delft), it's been arrival by train after flying into CDG. I could fly direct from here to Heathrow or Amsterdam directly, but it's like 3x the cost of driving to Montreal and flying into CDG. Even after you factor in a couple of weeks of airport parking, it's still cheaper to fly to France and take the train.:(
It doesn't surprise me that there's a lot of drug trafficking happening from Willemstad. I have been there a few times for scuba diving trips, and even though the island has a zero tolerance policy for drugs at all, I don't think I've ever seen a police car or uniformed officer on the island (though I have seen Dutch-flagged warships patrolling the waters). It does surprise me that there's an illegal drug problem in Amsterdam, though, since drugs are supposed to be semi-legal and obtainable with a prescription from a doctor aren't they? I thought the Netherlands was one of the few nations that's smart enough to treat substance abuse like a medical problem instead of a criminal one.
I'll get hate for saying this but if ALL of your bombings and attacks are ONLY coming from ONE group, a group that rhymes with "Buslim"? Then it is NOT profiling to throw an extra glance at those that are part of that group!
You won't get hate for it, but you'll probably get a group of people pointing out that they aren't all coming from that particular ethnic group, and that there's a very long history of terrorism happening pretty much everywhere.
If the Muslims were really as fucked up as some people would have you believe, the world would be a glass-floored parking lot by now. There are a billion of 'em in the world today, and some of them have had nuclear weapons for 40 years. Like the rest of us, most of 'em just want to be allowed to live their lives in peace and without persecution. If you held up examples like Ted Kaczynski or David Koresh or the IRA as examples of every Christian, you'd be shouted down pretty quickly, so it boggles the mind that people are ok with making the same comparisons for Muslims. That has nothing to do with political correctness, that's about opening your eyes and seeing that the overwhelming majority of Muslims just want to be left alone.
People don't tend to report on the Muslims living in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Jordan, or Pakistan because it's not interesting news: they're all countries with a majority Muslim population, and they're all moderate/progressive countries. Hell, 2 of those countries currently have a woman sitting as head of state... When was the last time the US had a female President? And yet you're calling *them* backwards...
Most of the world is pretty civilized about customs... it's really only the US, and a couple of airports in Canada and large airports in Europe that are gestapo-land.
I've seen tighter security at Dayton, Ohio than I did last time I flew into Charles de Gaulle: on arrival in Paris, we formed a lineup for customs, and a guard came out and shouted to the line "anybody with a Canadian passport, line up here", and those of us with Canadian passports didn't have to pass a security check at all, they just asked if we wanted the CDG stamp on the passport and waved us through. And that was post-9/11. On the way back, it was pretty much the same... put your bag through the x-ray machine, go through a metal detector, and they let you on the plane. I'm guessing that they'd already done the security/background checks, since you need to give your passport number when you buy the plane ticket these days, but it could just be that Air France is more civilized about things like that.
Still... by far the most relaxed security I've ever seen in an airport was in Willemstad, Curacao. The plane landed at 4am, which probably had something to do with it, but it was basically a case of "welcome to the island, enjoy your stay!" for everybody.
Old cars were never designed to pass the load (dyno) tests California now requires. They can generally be made to do it but even a mildly degraded catalyst or the wrong thermostat (for example) can cause you to fail an inspection.
I'll grant that, and this is where I'm confused. Here, it's done by a mechanic and if you fail an emissions test (which you need in order to renew the plate), they give you a list of deficiencies, and ask if you want them to fix it or will fix it yourself. You test again after it's fixed, and if you pass you are given a piece of paper which certifies you passed. Take that to the license bureau with your renewal fee, and you're done.
What are they doing in California that's different than that? Our own emissions testing program was designed after the California program, and was intended to be essentially the same.
Old cars were never designed to pass the load (dyno) tests California now requires. They can generally be made to do it but even a mildly degraded catalyst or the wrong thermostat (for example) can cause you to fail an inspection.
No, they weren't. Old cars also weren't designed to reduce pollution/smog output, which was kind of the point of the emissions tests. Old cars *stink*, and we're better off with them off the road.
And having a catalytic converter that's not running as it's supposed to or the wrong thermostat can cause the car's emissions control system to work improperly. Again... that's kind of the point of emissions testing: to make sure your car is working properly in the first place.
I get it... I was a poor student at one point as well, and was driving around a car that was 12 years old at one point, but I still tried to make sure it was being maintained properly, and that any replacement parts were the proper parts as proscribed by the manufacturer. Besides, people like me are the reason people like you have cars in the first place. Car ownership is one of the only places where trickle-down economics actually works....
Please let us not forget the $70 bi-yearly smog inspections (which become yearly if you happen to fail one). God I hate this state.
If you fail one, you *should* have to get it more often. The point of the emissions test is to make sure your car is running the way it should be. Around here, they won't let you renew your plates unless you've got the piece of paper saying you've passed the test at all.
New cars are exempted here, at least... I think it needs to be 5 years old before you need to get an e-test done. I think also that the test is annual for cars over a certain age, but I've honestly never run into that limit. It's been almost a decade since the last time that I needed to get a test done: my last 2 cars were bought new.
Side note/question... while I realize that I'm in a different part of the world, and have different standards than they do in California... how hard is it to fail an emissions test? It's pretty near impossible for a new(ish) car to fail a test around here unless you have oil or fuel leaking into the exhaust system, not because the standards aren't that stringent, but because newer cars have been built with emissions control in mind. This may be different for American cars, but I usually tend to drive Japanese cars by preference. (though I did at one point have a Korean car with a Chevrolet badge on it... piece of junk, but it still had no problem passing the emissions standards... it was rated a ULEV for the California market).
I thought I was living a pretty average lifestyle but I spent $6,600 on my current ca
Your current car was not bought new. Either that, or your current car is a motor scooter or a low end motorcycle.
My current car was bought new, and while it wasn't $60,000, it is a model whose top trim level is not far from that new. Most people don't have $60,000 cash lying about, but they use credit to buy stuff like that. Believe it or not, despite the banking crash in the US some of us still have good credit.
Education being mandatory isn't indicative of a person's intelligence. Learning, yes, but intelligence is something that's extremely difficult to quantify, in part because it doesn't actually rely on learning and book smarts.:)
The problem is, a certain amount of advertising is necessary to make ends meet. The content doesn't pay for itself, and the choices are either to put everything behind a paywall, or have advertising. The tracking/etc. is the ad industry's attempt to make advertising online more profitable: they have a *very* low clickthrough rate to begin with, and hope that by providing targetted advertising, they'll have a better return on investment, and can sell ad impressions for more money.
At least in theory. In practice, what they're tracking on people is downright creepy. I do run ad blockers, and cookie cleaners, and multiple other add-ons to prevent my browser from leaving any permanent traces from session to session. It's not because I find advertising specifically intrusive, it's because I don't like the tracking.
Why does it matter if "God did it" or "it happened from a random chance accident of random molecules" when one is studying how DNA works?
The bone of contention there is that sometimes people use the "god did it" as an excuse not to look deeper. Evolution is, for example, a fairly well accepted theory for why the different species came to be, but some people stick their fingers in their ears and refuse to even consider its validity because it runs counter to their idea that "God did it".
This is not the case for everybody who chooses to have a religion, but it is the case for the ones who are making this difficult for those who don't want religion to dictate everything in their life.
The world would be a much better place if *everybody* recognized that religion is a personal decision and choice you need to make for yourself, and that another's choice doesn't have to match your own for you to both be happy.
Cool story bro, but median (raw) IQ scores have been rising for decades if not centuries.
The median IQ score is, by definition, 100....
While the specific skills being taught to obtain that median are different today than they were 200 years ago, I would hardly be as bold as to say that we're smarter today than we were back then. You very likely couldn't survive on your own 200 years ago, or even 100 years ago most likely, because most of us lack skills that would have been considered basic survival. In an agrarian pre-industrial society, your average computer geek would be considered very much a fool.
Case in point, the standard education given 150 years ago included multiple languages, classics, history, literature, logic, and mathematics. In order to graduate from University, you had to be proficient in all of these. Latin and quite often Greek were not optional, nor were the major European languages: English, Spanish, French, and German. Today, we teach a *very* different array of skills as a base point, but it's not any harder or easier for us than it was for them.
About the only basis for your point that actually makes some sense is that nutrition, especially in early childhood, has a *huge* impact on your brain development and performance later in life, but even that's a bit of a failing argument: our nutrition today is worse than it was 50 years ago because of the prevalence of junk food in the modern diet and the sedentary nature of the modern lifestyle.
The problem is that Christianity is quite contradictory. It teaches both love and hate.
It doesn't really. The Bible has this contradiction in it, but the thing that most of the hateful xians seem to forget is that, according to their own dogma, Christ came to Earth and died on the cross in order to complete the old covenant established by the rules of the old testament, and to establish a new relationship with their God based on love. It's true that Jesus had more than a few quite famous temper tantrums and blowups against certain people in the book, but that was never about the person themselves, or the actions even, it was the location for the actions. The parable about the money changers in the temple, for example, wasn't about the moneychanging itself, it was about the fact that it was happening inside a temple, and was debasing the purpose of the temple to become a financial institution. And of course, the favourite thing for the "devout" to hate, homosexuality, isn't even mentioned in the gospels.
The ones who actually practice what they preach (and what's taught in the book they espouse) are quite accepting of those around them, and are usually pretty easy to deal with.
And no, I'm not a Christian. I was raised in a fairly liberal and open-minded Anglican family, and don't really have much use for the Christian God in my life. I don't really care one way or another whether God exists, nor do I feel like I need fear of damnation to give me a reason to treat those around me with respect.
Rayleigh scattering probably doesn't have anything to do with the Earth appearing blue at a distance, no, but the Earth still does appear blue to an outside observer. It may have something to do with the planet mostly being covered in water..
Thus, Orson Scott Card should be denied a living, he should be outcast, he should be shown no tolerance. This is kind of the start of how things go badly. A section gets denigrated, then they need to be punished, next they need to be imprisoned.
Tolerance is allowing him to spew his drivel, not paying him for it. I'm not in any way saying he shouldn't be allowed to make an ass of himself on the Internet, but if you think I'm going to pay for the privilege of being told that my partner and I should be in prison because he gets weirded out by the thought of us having sex, you've got another thing coming.
I think as much as a person should be able to campaign for gay rights, a person should be able to hold an opposing viewpoint.
Campaigning for gay rights is about giving equal treatment to everybody. Nobody gets special treatment under the law. That is most emphatically not what Card is arguing for. Gay marriage? We should all be allowed to have miserable sexless lives if that's what we choose, not just straight couples.
Tell him that from next month you will be charging him monthly rent, and you will not be buying him anything. You're happy for him to stay, but he has to pay his way.
If that was going to work, he probably would have suggested it by now. When I had to move back in at my parents' place after University (didn't want to, but took me almost a year to find a stable job and I was having some health issues at the time), I told them going into it that I'd be out as soon as I could afford it, and that in the mean time I wanted to continue paying as much of the bills as I could afford. It was a major blow to my pride to have to move back in with my folks at 26, and the next couple of years sucked until I could get my own place again, but I was still paying for my own food, the internet/phone/TV service for everybody, doing chores, and contributing what I could to the mortgage.
for most european countries citizens it wouldn't be even legal to be spying on other countries(to do espionage abroad). for NSA faculty it's legal. so a lot of the intelligence - which isn't a lot at all - we gather is by trading information with others.
I thought it wasn't legal, actually... NSA is for internal, CIA is for external. Kind of like the distinction between MI5 and MI6 in the UK...
So was Dell. The specs aren't on their website any more for it, but I had one of these. It was a great little laptop until the battery died and I didn't feel like spending $120 for a new battery when I could get a new computer for $300.
There's laws (in theory at least) in the US to protect whistle blowers, even those who release information the way he did. While we can argue back and forth over whether he'll get a fair trial, he is entitled to his day in court. From what I've read of it, the information gathering being done is against the US constitution, and he should be exonerated.
So why, then, did he choose to go into exile rather than accept the consequences and justify his actions in court? And what did he think he had to gain by going to Julian Assange? These are the questions people need to be asking about this situation...
BTW, you don't have to be a spook (or former spook) to guess that the US was spying on everybody they could. You'd have to be pretty naive to think they weren't, given the political climate over the last 12 years.
If that suggests/implies it'll eventually work on Linux with HTML5/extensions on Chrome browser, I can live with that.
All the shouting about DRM being evil and everything doesn't really accomplish what we want. You end up looking like a zealot, and you would have better luck holding back the tide with a thimble. If you want to get rid of DRM, you need to show them that it's not necessary. The best way you can do that is by not pirating their stuff, and actually paying for it if you feel that it's worth paying for. If you don't think it's worth the price they're charging, then don't pay it, but don't download it and then rationalize it by saying that it's too expensive to pay for, or you plan on deleting it once you've watched it. The people creating content have a right to set the price they want to charge for it, and you, the consumer, have a right to vote with your wallet. But voting with your wallet does *not* mean circumventing the rights of the creators, it means not consuming the product at all.
And I realize there's a very good chance that you don't download stuff that you haven't paid for, and that I'm ranting at the wrong person, but I have absolutely zero sympathy for the people who piss and moan about DRM in one breath, and then talk about how they download their movies and music because information wants to be free. These people are the reason DRM exists in the first place. I don't like DRM either, but as long as it doesn't interfere with the legitimate use of a product or service I'm paying for, I don't really notice it. If it starts to interfere with my use, I simply won't buy the product in question. The market will sort itself out, but as long as people keep giving them a reason to invent more draconian methods, those methods are going to keep being created.
I think it's pretty clear where the CoS stands on internet freedom, and what they want from you if they ask you for a meeting. Why would anyone in their right mind even talk with these people? What, do you think you're going to REASON with them?!? Do you want to give them a chance to threaten you *in person*?!?
Wouldn't you? Probably wide-eyed optimism is the best explanation for why such meeting happened, but if there was any chance at all in getting them to see reason, and you had the time (or it was your mandate to try getting people like them to see reason, as is the case with the EFF), wouldn't you take the time to try? I would.
And who cares if they threatened me? Google isn't doing anything illegal with how they filter their search results, and they're within their rights to keep the algorithm by which it's tabulated proprietary. If CoS doesn't like that there's lots of anti-scientology hits on google, they can buy the ad word, or they can do something about why people are posting this stuff against them in the first place. Or they could try to Google bomb themselves, but that probably wouldn't go down very well if it were made public....
Besides which, if you search Google for "church of scientology", the first hit is their own website. It's not like Google is deliberately treating them badly...
It's perfunctory. In this city, for example, it's very rare for a performance not to get a standing ovation.... I've seen some absolutely terrible performances still get 'em, because apparently, that's what people do around here.
If you want to blog online, use Facebook or Twitter or any other established social platform
Maybe I don't want the advertising that goes with a platform like that, or the space limitations, or the way they assert copyright on the stuff I create, or maybe the WP blog is just a front-end for a domain name that's primarily there for e-mail, or...? There's a lot of reasons to run something like WordPress, and social media as you suggest is not a fix-all substitution.
Besides, it's not like Facebook and Twitter have never been hacked... they're big juicy targets with the number of users they have and the amount of information they're collecting about their users.
and we all know how well that's worked... with Adobe dropping Flash support on Linux, Chrome is the only browser that reliably plays all of the videos on Youtube. How long ago, again, did they announce they were switching to html5/vp8?
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Passengers on flights coming from Willemstad into Amsterdam get checked 100%, because of the lax checks at Willemstad and the proportionally high amount of drug trafficking on this route.
Could do. I've never flown from Willemstad to Amsterdam, just Willemstad to Toronto. Actually, I've never flown to Amsterdam period... the handful of times I've been there (I have family in Delft), it's been arrival by train after flying into CDG. I could fly direct from here to Heathrow or Amsterdam directly, but it's like 3x the cost of driving to Montreal and flying into CDG. Even after you factor in a couple of weeks of airport parking, it's still cheaper to fly to France and take the train. :(
It doesn't surprise me that there's a lot of drug trafficking happening from Willemstad. I have been there a few times for scuba diving trips, and even though the island has a zero tolerance policy for drugs at all, I don't think I've ever seen a police car or uniformed officer on the island (though I have seen Dutch-flagged warships patrolling the waters). It does surprise me that there's an illegal drug problem in Amsterdam, though, since drugs are supposed to be semi-legal and obtainable with a prescription from a doctor aren't they? I thought the Netherlands was one of the few nations that's smart enough to treat substance abuse like a medical problem instead of a criminal one.
I'll get hate for saying this but if ALL of your bombings and attacks are ONLY coming from ONE group, a group that rhymes with "Buslim"? Then it is NOT profiling to throw an extra glance at those that are part of that group!
You won't get hate for it, but you'll probably get a group of people pointing out that they aren't all coming from that particular ethnic group, and that there's a very long history of terrorism happening pretty much everywhere.
If the Muslims were really as fucked up as some people would have you believe, the world would be a glass-floored parking lot by now. There are a billion of 'em in the world today, and some of them have had nuclear weapons for 40 years. Like the rest of us, most of 'em just want to be allowed to live their lives in peace and without persecution. If you held up examples like Ted Kaczynski or David Koresh or the IRA as examples of every Christian, you'd be shouted down pretty quickly, so it boggles the mind that people are ok with making the same comparisons for Muslims. That has nothing to do with political correctness, that's about opening your eyes and seeing that the overwhelming majority of Muslims just want to be left alone.
People don't tend to report on the Muslims living in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Jordan, or Pakistan because it's not interesting news: they're all countries with a majority Muslim population, and they're all moderate/progressive countries. Hell, 2 of those countries currently have a woman sitting as head of state... When was the last time the US had a female President? And yet you're calling *them* backwards...
Most of the world is pretty civilized about customs... it's really only the US, and a couple of airports in Canada and large airports in Europe that are gestapo-land.
I've seen tighter security at Dayton, Ohio than I did last time I flew into Charles de Gaulle: on arrival in Paris, we formed a lineup for customs, and a guard came out and shouted to the line "anybody with a Canadian passport, line up here", and those of us with Canadian passports didn't have to pass a security check at all, they just asked if we wanted the CDG stamp on the passport and waved us through. And that was post-9/11. On the way back, it was pretty much the same... put your bag through the x-ray machine, go through a metal detector, and they let you on the plane. I'm guessing that they'd already done the security/background checks, since you need to give your passport number when you buy the plane ticket these days, but it could just be that Air France is more civilized about things like that.
Still... by far the most relaxed security I've ever seen in an airport was in Willemstad, Curacao. The plane landed at 4am, which probably had something to do with it, but it was basically a case of "welcome to the island, enjoy your stay!" for everybody.
Old cars were never designed to pass the load (dyno) tests California now requires. They can generally be made to do it but even a mildly degraded catalyst or the wrong thermostat (for example) can cause you to fail an inspection.
I'll grant that, and this is where I'm confused. Here, it's done by a mechanic and if you fail an emissions test (which you need in order to renew the plate), they give you a list of deficiencies, and ask if you want them to fix it or will fix it yourself. You test again after it's fixed, and if you pass you are given a piece of paper which certifies you passed. Take that to the license bureau with your renewal fee, and you're done.
What are they doing in California that's different than that? Our own emissions testing program was designed after the California program, and was intended to be essentially the same.
Old cars were never designed to pass the load (dyno) tests California now requires. They can generally be made to do it but even a mildly degraded catalyst or the wrong thermostat (for example) can cause you to fail an inspection.
No, they weren't. Old cars also weren't designed to reduce pollution/smog output, which was kind of the point of the emissions tests. Old cars *stink*, and we're better off with them off the road.
And having a catalytic converter that's not running as it's supposed to or the wrong thermostat can cause the car's emissions control system to work improperly. Again... that's kind of the point of emissions testing: to make sure your car is working properly in the first place.
I get it... I was a poor student at one point as well, and was driving around a car that was 12 years old at one point, but I still tried to make sure it was being maintained properly, and that any replacement parts were the proper parts as proscribed by the manufacturer. Besides, people like me are the reason people like you have cars in the first place. Car ownership is one of the only places where trickle-down economics actually works....
Please let us not forget the $70 bi-yearly smog inspections (which become yearly if you happen to fail one). God I hate this state.
If you fail one, you *should* have to get it more often. The point of the emissions test is to make sure your car is running the way it should be. Around here, they won't let you renew your plates unless you've got the piece of paper saying you've passed the test at all.
New cars are exempted here, at least... I think it needs to be 5 years old before you need to get an e-test done. I think also that the test is annual for cars over a certain age, but I've honestly never run into that limit. It's been almost a decade since the last time that I needed to get a test done: my last 2 cars were bought new.
Side note/question... while I realize that I'm in a different part of the world, and have different standards than they do in California... how hard is it to fail an emissions test? It's pretty near impossible for a new(ish) car to fail a test around here unless you have oil or fuel leaking into the exhaust system, not because the standards aren't that stringent, but because newer cars have been built with emissions control in mind. This may be different for American cars, but I usually tend to drive Japanese cars by preference. (though I did at one point have a Korean car with a Chevrolet badge on it... piece of junk, but it still had no problem passing the emissions standards... it was rated a ULEV for the California market).
The problem I find with this analogy is that you're comparing a generic technology to a specific company.
Yes, but it's a specific company that has already announced plans to target cheaper market segments.
I thought I was living a pretty average lifestyle but I spent $6,600 on my current ca
Your current car was not bought new. Either that, or your current car is a motor scooter or a low end motorcycle.
My current car was bought new, and while it wasn't $60,000, it is a model whose top trim level is not far from that new. Most people don't have $60,000 cash lying about, but they use credit to buy stuff like that. Believe it or not, despite the banking crash in the US some of us still have good credit.
Education being mandatory isn't indicative of a person's intelligence. Learning, yes, but intelligence is something that's extremely difficult to quantify, in part because it doesn't actually rely on learning and book smarts. :)
The problem is, a certain amount of advertising is necessary to make ends meet. The content doesn't pay for itself, and the choices are either to put everything behind a paywall, or have advertising. The tracking/etc. is the ad industry's attempt to make advertising online more profitable: they have a *very* low clickthrough rate to begin with, and hope that by providing targetted advertising, they'll have a better return on investment, and can sell ad impressions for more money.
At least in theory. In practice, what they're tracking on people is downright creepy. I do run ad blockers, and cookie cleaners, and multiple other add-ons to prevent my browser from leaving any permanent traces from session to session. It's not because I find advertising specifically intrusive, it's because I don't like the tracking.
Never heard of flash cookies, eh?
Why does it matter if "God did it" or "it happened from a random chance accident of random molecules" when one is studying how DNA works?
The bone of contention there is that sometimes people use the "god did it" as an excuse not to look deeper. Evolution is, for example, a fairly well accepted theory for why the different species came to be, but some people stick their fingers in their ears and refuse to even consider its validity because it runs counter to their idea that "God did it".
This is not the case for everybody who chooses to have a religion, but it is the case for the ones who are making this difficult for those who don't want religion to dictate everything in their life.
The world would be a much better place if *everybody* recognized that religion is a personal decision and choice you need to make for yourself, and that another's choice doesn't have to match your own for you to both be happy.
Cool story bro, but median (raw) IQ scores have been rising for decades if not centuries.
The median IQ score is, by definition, 100....
While the specific skills being taught to obtain that median are different today than they were 200 years ago, I would hardly be as bold as to say that we're smarter today than we were back then. You very likely couldn't survive on your own 200 years ago, or even 100 years ago most likely, because most of us lack skills that would have been considered basic survival. In an agrarian pre-industrial society, your average computer geek would be considered very much a fool.
Case in point, the standard education given 150 years ago included multiple languages, classics, history, literature, logic, and mathematics. In order to graduate from University, you had to be proficient in all of these. Latin and quite often Greek were not optional, nor were the major European languages: English, Spanish, French, and German. Today, we teach a *very* different array of skills as a base point, but it's not any harder or easier for us than it was for them.
About the only basis for your point that actually makes some sense is that nutrition, especially in early childhood, has a *huge* impact on your brain development and performance later in life, but even that's a bit of a failing argument: our nutrition today is worse than it was 50 years ago because of the prevalence of junk food in the modern diet and the sedentary nature of the modern lifestyle.
The problem is that Christianity is quite contradictory. It teaches both love and hate.
It doesn't really. The Bible has this contradiction in it, but the thing that most of the hateful xians seem to forget is that, according to their own dogma, Christ came to Earth and died on the cross in order to complete the old covenant established by the rules of the old testament, and to establish a new relationship with their God based on love. It's true that Jesus had more than a few quite famous temper tantrums and blowups against certain people in the book, but that was never about the person themselves, or the actions even, it was the location for the actions. The parable about the money changers in the temple, for example, wasn't about the moneychanging itself, it was about the fact that it was happening inside a temple, and was debasing the purpose of the temple to become a financial institution. And of course, the favourite thing for the "devout" to hate, homosexuality, isn't even mentioned in the gospels.
The ones who actually practice what they preach (and what's taught in the book they espouse) are quite accepting of those around them, and are usually pretty easy to deal with.
And no, I'm not a Christian. I was raised in a fairly liberal and open-minded Anglican family, and don't really have much use for the Christian God in my life. I don't really care one way or another whether God exists, nor do I feel like I need fear of damnation to give me a reason to treat those around me with respect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot
Rayleigh scattering probably doesn't have anything to do with the Earth appearing blue at a distance, no, but the Earth still does appear blue to an outside observer. It may have something to do with the planet mostly being covered in water..
Thus, Orson Scott Card should be denied a living, he should be outcast, he should be shown no tolerance. This is kind of the start of how things go badly. A section gets denigrated, then they need to be punished, next they need to be imprisoned.
Tolerance is allowing him to spew his drivel, not paying him for it. I'm not in any way saying he shouldn't be allowed to make an ass of himself on the Internet, but if you think I'm going to pay for the privilege of being told that my partner and I should be in prison because he gets weirded out by the thought of us having sex, you've got another thing coming.
I think as much as a person should be able to campaign for gay rights, a person should be able to hold an opposing viewpoint.
Campaigning for gay rights is about giving equal treatment to everybody. Nobody gets special treatment under the law. That is most emphatically not what Card is arguing for. Gay marriage? We should all be allowed to have miserable sexless lives if that's what we choose, not just straight couples.
Orson Scott Card is pleading for tolerance? That's rich.
Tell him that from next month you will be charging him monthly rent, and you will not be buying him anything. You're happy for him to stay, but he has to pay his way.
If that was going to work, he probably would have suggested it by now. When I had to move back in at my parents' place after University (didn't want to, but took me almost a year to find a stable job and I was having some health issues at the time), I told them going into it that I'd be out as soon as I could afford it, and that in the mean time I wanted to continue paying as much of the bills as I could afford. It was a major blow to my pride to have to move back in with my folks at 26, and the next couple of years sucked until I could get my own place again, but I was still paying for my own food, the internet/phone/TV service for everybody, doing chores, and contributing what I could to the mortgage.
for most european countries citizens it wouldn't be even legal to be spying on other countries(to do espionage abroad). for NSA faculty it's legal.
so a lot of the intelligence - which isn't a lot at all - we gather is by trading information with others.
I thought it wasn't legal, actually... NSA is for internal, CIA is for external. Kind of like the distinction between MI5 and MI6 in the UK...
http://www.ehow.com/facts_6860900_specifications-dell-latitude-ls.html
So was Dell. The specs aren't on their website any more for it, but I had one of these. It was a great little laptop until the battery died and I didn't feel like spending $120 for a new battery when I could get a new computer for $300.
There's laws (in theory at least) in the US to protect whistle blowers, even those who release information the way he did. While we can argue back and forth over whether he'll get a fair trial, he is entitled to his day in court. From what I've read of it, the information gathering being done is against the US constitution, and he should be exonerated.
So why, then, did he choose to go into exile rather than accept the consequences and justify his actions in court? And what did he think he had to gain by going to Julian Assange? These are the questions people need to be asking about this situation...
BTW, you don't have to be a spook (or former spook) to guess that the US was spying on everybody they could. You'd have to be pretty naive to think they weren't, given the political climate over the last 12 years.
If that suggests/implies it'll eventually work on Linux with HTML5/extensions on Chrome browser, I can live with that.
All the shouting about DRM being evil and everything doesn't really accomplish what we want. You end up looking like a zealot, and you would have better luck holding back the tide with a thimble. If you want to get rid of DRM, you need to show them that it's not necessary. The best way you can do that is by not pirating their stuff, and actually paying for it if you feel that it's worth paying for. If you don't think it's worth the price they're charging, then don't pay it, but don't download it and then rationalize it by saying that it's too expensive to pay for, or you plan on deleting it once you've watched it. The people creating content have a right to set the price they want to charge for it, and you, the consumer, have a right to vote with your wallet. But voting with your wallet does *not* mean circumventing the rights of the creators, it means not consuming the product at all.
And I realize there's a very good chance that you don't download stuff that you haven't paid for, and that I'm ranting at the wrong person, but I have absolutely zero sympathy for the people who piss and moan about DRM in one breath, and then talk about how they download their movies and music because information wants to be free. These people are the reason DRM exists in the first place. I don't like DRM either, but as long as it doesn't interfere with the legitimate use of a product or service I'm paying for, I don't really notice it. If it starts to interfere with my use, I simply won't buy the product in question. The market will sort itself out, but as long as people keep giving them a reason to invent more draconian methods, those methods are going to keep being created.
I think it's pretty clear where the CoS stands on internet freedom, and what they want from you if they ask you for a meeting. Why would anyone in their right mind even talk with these people? What, do you think you're going to REASON with them?!? Do you want to give them a chance to threaten you *in person*?!?
Wouldn't you? Probably wide-eyed optimism is the best explanation for why such meeting happened, but if there was any chance at all in getting them to see reason, and you had the time (or it was your mandate to try getting people like them to see reason, as is the case with the EFF), wouldn't you take the time to try? I would.
And who cares if they threatened me? Google isn't doing anything illegal with how they filter their search results, and they're within their rights to keep the algorithm by which it's tabulated proprietary. If CoS doesn't like that there's lots of anti-scientology hits on google, they can buy the ad word, or they can do something about why people are posting this stuff against them in the first place. Or they could try to Google bomb themselves, but that probably wouldn't go down very well if it were made public....
Besides which, if you search Google for "church of scientology", the first hit is their own website. It's not like Google is deliberately treating them badly...
It's perfunctory. In this city, for example, it's very rare for a performance not to get a standing ovation.... I've seen some absolutely terrible performances still get 'em, because apparently, that's what people do around here.
If you want to blog online, use Facebook or Twitter or any other established social platform
Maybe I don't want the advertising that goes with a platform like that, or the space limitations, or the way they assert copyright on the stuff I create, or maybe the WP blog is just a front-end for a domain name that's primarily there for e-mail, or...? There's a lot of reasons to run something like WordPress, and social media as you suggest is not a fix-all substitution.
Besides, it's not like Facebook and Twitter have never been hacked... they're big juicy targets with the number of users they have and the amount of information they're collecting about their users.
and we all know how well that's worked... with Adobe dropping Flash support on Linux, Chrome is the only browser that reliably plays all of the videos on Youtube. How long ago, again, did they announce they were switching to html5/vp8?