They call them "casebooks," and they're a combination of (1) commentary discussing the field a bit, and (2) cases which have been exerpted to make them say whatever the the casebook authors are trying to say. Their quality and honesty vary.
> “If a bunch of amateurs can find it,” Mr. Weedon said, “so can our adversaries.”
True for some of our adversaries, but not all. Ten or fifteen years ago there was a big hubbub in DC when a web site or two went up to track our spy satellite launches. Pre-internet, it was generally just a few big governments who had the resources to track them. But with the amateur community helping, suddenly anyone with a web browser could get some idea of when satellite coverage would be available for a given area. This is one of a very few areas of government operations where I tend to favor secrecy. Not for the money spent--knowing within an order of magnitude how much we're spending on a massive defense program is important if we are to retain any civilian control over the military-industrial complex--but for the actual launches and orbits.
We compromise intelligence assets when we do anything else, and that can mean our leaders are making decision with even worse information. Those decisions cost lives.
Except, of course, for the incidental media play facebook gets and the fact that some of its users want such a day.
What's more interesting is that this is the Pakistani Lawyers, who are usually the voice of reason over there. (i.e. the people who say it's not okay to have dictators in power, and who are a counter to the extremists.) So maybe this is a political move to help them solidify their base and help keep them more attractive to the rank-and-file than the extremists. The idea is to show that moderates support religion, and so not to let religion be too great a tool for the extremists. Or perhaps not.
(I don't actually follow the politics over there, I just have a general sense from a few Pakistanis.)
It's voluntary from the college's point of view. The problem is that things that are voluntary from the school's point of view are things that students who are applying are strongly compelled to do. It's absurd, but higher education admissions are a game of signals, and high school students (And their parents) don't want to risk giving the wrong signals when there are thousands of people competing with them. This means that there's a strong incentive do anything "voluntary" on the application.
The school may not even be thinking this, because schools often think students' calculations about how to get in are just over-the-top and absurd. But the schools should be thinking this, because applicants at competitive schools will almost always make those calculations, no matter that the school says "Don't worry about it so much" in the left hand while saying "We only admit the very best!" in the right hand.
The other important point here is that today they limited the application of life without parole, saying it was cruel and unusual punishment to apply to a juvenile who had not committed a murder. This bring America closer in line with with the human rights standards of the Western World.
Okay, I could understand not needing C if you needed assembly, since it at least makes sure you can figure out what's going on. But when ALL of the languages you're teaching are high-level, it's not a computer science degree, it's just a programming degree. Because science is about understanding how stuff works, and the higher level it is, the less you understand. (Like how you start out with "Everything is made up of atoms." It's kind of true, and maybe it's science in fourth grade. But it's not really true, and when you have a college degree in the science, you should know better.)
> The feds have NO interest whatsoever in providing skill training, no matter what their propaganda tells you. At the FCI where I was, inmates typically slept till lunch, signed false pay sheets claiming 40 hours worked. They thought they were getting over, but it's actualy the feds, who can provide "proof" of "gainfully employed inmates."
> But it's a scam. The BOP/DOJ has a vested interest in the 75% recidivism rate..
It's used as a scam. That doesn't mean it *is* a scam. If justice knew how to lower the recidivism rate 50%, they would do it. Maybe you think they wouldn't, but realize you're seeing it from a very different POV than they are. The inside of a prison doesn't work the way that the people at Justice wish it did, and most of the exposure you get in a prison or as an inmate to people from Justice, or Feds, or even regular cops, is them trying to entrap guards or prisoners into drug deals, or the typical confession scenario. Places where cops act essentially as Judas Iscariot, as a betrayer, because that's what they're trained to do and it's what works in the short-term. But just because they betray doesn't mean they mean evil because of some screwed up incentive structure to want more money for Justice.
Maybe it's a scam for BOP, something they can sell the politicians. When you work in the field a long time, you get used to the recidivism rate, and think most people, you can't really do anything to help. But that doesn't mean they *want* that recidivism rate. There's enough bad sh*t in the world that if all the recidivists went away, you'd still be able to argue for more money for justice than the budget they have now, and there'd still be reasons for it. We have hundreds of thousands of american teens at high risk for being actually enslaved every year, with the human trafficking problem. (Sources: The Polaris Project, River of Innocents, Victor Malarek's The Natashas). Kids who survive hell and get back up again and build their lives. Children who can't build their lives because they've never known a family and they never learned how to build themselves up. There are more than enough problems for Justice. The day there's no more need for the DOJ is the day the DOJ employees have their biggest freaking party ever.
> The decision was not a final judgment, so it is not appealable.
Not immediately appealable, anyway.
For the nonlawyers in the room, summary judgment means basically that somebody wins their argument, or parts of their argument, because even if everything the other guy said was true, the other guy still loses. Like if you ask a kid "Did you throw a rock at Timmy?" And the kid says "I did, but I like throwing rocks!" or "It was a horseshoe, not a rock."
In this case, even if everything Limewire said was true, they still lose. (At least, they still lose everything they lost here.)
The decision can usually be appealed, but only after the trial ends or in rare cases with special permission. Since it influences the outcome of settlement proceedings, and most things settle, they are rarely but not never appealed.
> I understand this joke often gets +5 Funny, even though I don't know what it refers to. So here I go: > No disassemble Johnny 5!
It's from a 1986 movie, Short Circuit. (There was also a sequel). Fun old family movie about an experimental robot developing a personality. In the second one, there are also bank robbers.
Although it still suggests that perhaps standards have risen since 9/11. From the standpoint of the traveller, the question is still one of liberty v. security.
> The whole purpose of the scanners to emasculate and demean the people who pass through them. This should be clear to everyone.
No, that's just how they're used in some cases. Although to be fair, the last time I ran into an abusive and power-hungry TSA employee was pre-9/11, and everyone I've seen in the last few years has been professional, courteous, and often amiable. But I don't travel much.
Scanners are really just a deterrent. Kind of like polygraphs--sure, someone can probably figure out a way around it, but it deters a lot of people from trying things they shouldn't try and catches a few really stupid people. Like Congressional Representatives who have their aid carry a gun for them or multimillionaire basketball players who take their weed through customs, plus a hundred thousand really stupid people we don't hear about because they're not famous.
Sure, most of the time the behavior it deters or catches is probably stuff that doesn't hurt anyone. But that doesn't mean it doesn't serve a function beyond emasculation.
Strangely, that last paragraph may also apply to significant others... (of either gender)
Quoth the article: "The $170,000 machines, which were introduced last year, took some heat from fliers who weren't quite ready to show their bod to government employees... But if this latest incident is any indication, the scanners sound like good news for anti-terrorism and bad news for less-than-average men."
The implication here seems to be that it's okay to eliminate individual privacy rights because only poorly endowed men will complain. Granted, a news-hat was just trying to end on a light note, but treating it lightly undermines the legitimacy of the privacy concern.
I see it more that of course we are responsible for those things because our choices and money pay for them. So we are responsible for trying to fix the problems in those systems.
We would be anyway because I tend to believe we all have a duty to, for example, try to stop or at least diminish slavery.
Either way, it's not about feeling guilty or about blame, it's about either (a) taking responsibility for the negative externalities that we incentivize by our actions, or (b) believing we can be a better world than we are right now and working to make that happen.
Either way, we don't get out of it by saying we have no choice since we can't eliminate all the externalities. Because we do have choice, and that choice lets us cut back on those externalities. (As by using renewable fuels, using products from companies that actively work to prevent slave labor use in their product chains, socially conscious investing, personal philanthropy, and community service).
GMU isn't a no-name school. It's law school is decent, for one. (42 out of about 200 by USNWR, not that their ratings are that determinative, but they give you an idea.) It doesn't have the same brand power nationally as top schools, but it's significantly better than no-namers.
It's not a boy scout badge, it's a cub scout pin. Kids in the cub-scout age range run around and go crazy regardless of whether they have video games. (At least, everyone I knew who had video games at that age ran around and went crazy, too.) Nobody is going to get this pin who doesn't play videogames--it's going to be kids who play videogames already, and they're going to have to at least learn how much the games cost. It doesn't hurt anything and it requires them to learn something. And nobody will seriously take it as a status symbol.
Sculpture, Theater, Cinematography, and Computers are all areas where someone might be interested in working in them one day, and one of the goals of the merit badge system is to introduce people to a wide range of areas. I only know any technical details about fingerprinting because I studied it one afternoon for a merit badge fifteen years ago--I get that knowledge forever, and there's nothing wrong with encouraging young men to learn things from a wide range of careers, activities, or knowledge. They recognize that some badges matter more than others to the scouting program, which is why you have eagle-required badges--but they also let people either earn something for the work they've put into an interest or for learning about a new potential field.
I would certainly be concerned about a video game merit badge on the boy scout level--but at the cub scout level, where it's one of a hundred things that are *really* easy to "earn," and where it still requires you to actually do something, I'm not too concerned about it.
> Terry Childs is a convicted felon, his record wasn't expunged, so the fact stands.
I think the point he was making is that a conviction 25 years in the past shouldn't automagically disqualify someone from a job. A lot changes in 25 years. And we have a lot of crimes we shouldn't have, and a system that's bad in some ways. Simple hypothetical: your local police plant a little pot on you because you're a libertarian who likes police accountability. A little pot, in your state, may be enough for felony intent to distribute. Your lawyer tells you to take the plea bargain to get it down to a misdemeanor, an you're going to--but to take the plea, you don't just have to take the bargain, you have to testify that you really are honestly guilty and you're taking the bargain because you're guilty. So you don't take it because you don't want to lie to the court--or generally don't want to lie. Now you're a felon.
Applies to other crimes, and other circumstances.
Or you do something really stupid when you're a kid. There's an accident, and you kill someone. Think of Garden State, and the latch on the dishwasher. Then you're a felon.
Doesn't mean you don't grow up.
Sure, there's recidivism. But there's also reform.
> Once people accept that morals are relative, the idea that there is a god who dictates morality disintegrates, along with some of the Popes power/influence.
Only if you take moral relativism to its extremes. If you wholly embrace moral relativism, then for the most part you have no morals of your own. (Because morals are fundamentally about what is right or wrong, not necessarily just what is right or wrong for you.)
But if you don't believe in any moral relativism, then you're probably a closed-minded, because you can't accept any system other than your own.
In my experience, good people are always somewhere in the middle. They believe in enough moral relativism to be open minded, but not so much that they're okay with shooting babies. Effectively, they believe in *limits* on moral relativism.
If you and someone else share beliefs in where those limits are, it's a lot easier to be friends with and respect one another. If you disagree, then it gets a lot harder. Sometimes, obviously, this happens without articulation.
God doesn't necessarily disintegrate under any of these systems. He just gets narrowed, to different degrees. In some cases he will disintegrate for you, if you're on the moral relativist spectrum somewhere where you don't believe in him. But if you don't believe in him, then from your POV he's disintegrated anyway. So it's moot until you die, at which point you get proven right or wrong.
> Are you suggesting that the KKK is some sort of devout Christian order? Don't they have a history of bombing Christian churches? This doesn't seem to make much sense.
I admit that I haven't researched the KKK, but its "avowed purpose is to protect the rights and further the interests of White Americans of the Protestant faith by violence and intimidation." (Source: Wikipedia.) (emphasis added).
And I agree. It doesn't make much sense at all.
As to the distinction between convincing people to believe through violence and doing it for some other reason, ultimately I think people do it because they want to or they're trained to or they have an economic motivation, and then they justify it in one of several ways.
In this case, though, we're also not talking about a belief, but an action: depicting Mohammed. It's not murder, but it's still not merely holding a belief--it's acting on a belief.
One guy made a stupid mistake. It doesn't mean someone can't do math, it just means he got one math question wrong--the failure wasn't so much the bad math, it was (1) the failure of him to check his math a second time when the vote came out as close as it did, and (2) the fact that they didn't have someone else check it.
It's okay to not notice an extra decimal place on a first approximation. It's not okay if it suddenly might matter because you're within a vote of not passing. When votes or scores actually make a difference, you have to either be especially rigorous or you have to make sure the information that actually makes the result indeterminate will never see the light of day. (The latter is only appropriate in a few cases, as where it doesn't change anything important and everyone thinks the decision has already been made. IT doesn't apply to zoning changes where millions of dollars are at issue. It might apply to some game scores.)
> Because while Christians will turn the other cheek, and Buddhists likewise, Muslims will fucking kill you.
It's rather a shame that this was modded informative, because it means we don't actually know that much about Islam here. Yes, there are Islamic extremists who will kill you. We had Christian extremists who would kill you for being Muslim for hundreds of years--the Crusades. We still have Christian extremists who burn crosses to scare people they don't like. The extremism on either side uses religion to justify its extremism, but it's not an inherent part of any faith. People have killed for Judaism, but I don't think any of the Jews I've known ever have. (I don't recall offhand if any of them have been in the IDF, and there are plenty of complicating factors, but the point stands. The IDF is not an extremist group by any stretch of the imagination, and I believe they try to do things correctly, but they also commit war crimes from time to time. Some militaries are worse about it than others. My rough estimate would be they're worse than the US but much better than, for example, Sudan. Though everybody's better than Sudan. Mmm... a little offtopic, though many militaries look to the will of God for justification, officially or unofficially. As does nonconventional warfare/terrorism.)
Anyway, the point is that some Christians kill too, and most Muslims don't. There may be more Muslims who will kill you for satire right now, but we shouldn't be generalizing because it polarizes us, and that's a bad thing. We want to bring people together on common interest in--for example--not being blown up. Living well. We don't want to drive wedges between America and the rest of the world by generalizing "America good. Muslims kill."
The interesting question is whether they censored it because it will be offensive, or because they'll get killed. To my mind the former is legitimate, if they decide to do that. (It's their network, and it's okay to be polite--even in comedy.) The latter is a much less satisfying and more probable possibility.
> A university is not a democracy. They are free to set the entry requirements as they see fit, so long as they don't violate civil rights. Professors are free to set the course requirements as they see fit, so long as they don't violate the university's requirements and guidelines.
True, a University is not a democracy. But that doesn't mean there isn't a difference between an institution that respects its members and one that doesn't, nor between people who respect students or colleagues or co-workers and people who don't. Merely because I have the freedom to insult someone by my words or actions does not mean that I should.
> Professors are free to set the course requirements as they see fit, so long as they don't violate the university's requirements and guidelines.
But a university might decide whether or not to make a service available for a professor, or to pay for it for his class. Likewise, a professor's decisions should be guided at least in part by some sense of morality. And there are also cases where particular standards may be set narrowly by universities or departments.
A professor may set insulting standards or policies in his course. They may be within university regulations, but nevertheless insulting--either because they assume a student is cheating, or require him to do something that assumes he is untruthful.
Some schools are less trusting than others. So are some professors. So are some teachers. In Grade school, I had a teacher who insisted I must have cheated because my handwriting changed as it got closer to the end of the page, getting smaller and smaller. She had no business teaching children if that was how she treated her students.
While the issue is less critical at University, where you expect brilliant professors with eccentricities or poor social skills to be part of the mix and students are more resilient, there is still a way of doing things where you avoid insulting people. Just because something isn't a democracy doesn't mean it should go around insulting people.
My point, in saying that the system assumed the students' guilt, was not that it was somehow state action, nor that it was undemocratic, but was rather that the system was bad. One might say inherently immoral. As is any system where you assume guilt and require proof of innocence.
> It's the easy assignments where that might be tempting--they're so mind-numbingnly dull.
Compilers! Supposedly one of the hardest courses in the department, it was boring and wrote and no more than long lines of code implemeting a particular compiler with nearly no room for creativity. We even had to remove some of the only cool stuff we did on the project--where by cool I mean insane and kind of awesome--like dynamically rewriting class instance pointers. It was wonderful, but of course it made the code helpelessly compiler-defendant. So we were drones.
Yes, it's not what you'd call robust code, but we weren't going for robust code. We just wanted to write fun code that happened to do what the assignment was.
> on some really hard assignments where I just had to reuse code
Really weird. It's the easy assignments where that might be tempting--they're so mind-numbingnly dull.
At my undergrad, I successfuly argued against allowing this kind of automated scanning program. Rather than punishing students if the professors discovered cheating, these programs actively assume every student is cheating and try to prove them innocent. This offends me. It's like accusing every professor of plagiarism until he shows fairly conclusively that he hasn't submitted somebody else's article. One professor had the audacity to ask if I was fighting the system because I cheat. He meant it jokingly, but it was still as offensive as hell.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at the quality metric, there are a lot of US cities on the top list. (Fewer packet losses, I think.)
In terms of worst states, downloading, look at Alaska, New Mexico, Wyoming, etc...
Uploading, look pretty much everywhere.
Also, aren't these states skewed toward power users?
They call them "casebooks," and they're a combination of (1) commentary discussing the field a bit, and (2) cases which have been exerpted to make them say whatever the the casebook authors are trying to say. Their quality and honesty vary.
> “If a bunch of amateurs can find it,” Mr. Weedon said, “so can our adversaries.”
True for some of our adversaries, but not all. Ten or fifteen years ago there was a big hubbub in DC when a web site or two went up to track our spy satellite launches. Pre-internet, it was generally just a few big governments who had the resources to track them. But with the amateur community helping, suddenly anyone with a web browser could get some idea of when satellite coverage would be available for a given area. This is one of a very few areas of government operations where I tend to favor secrecy. Not for the money spent--knowing within an order of magnitude how much we're spending on a massive defense program is important if we are to retain any civilian control over the military-industrial complex--but for the actual launches and orbits.
We compromise intelligence assets when we do anything else, and that can mean our leaders are making decision with even worse information. Those decisions cost lives.
Except, of course, for the incidental media play facebook gets and the fact that some of its users want such a day.
What's more interesting is that this is the Pakistani Lawyers, who are usually the voice of reason over there. (i.e. the people who say it's not okay to have dictators in power, and who are a counter to the extremists.) So maybe this is a political move to help them solidify their base and help keep them more attractive to the rank-and-file than the extremists. The idea is to show that moderates support religion, and so not to let religion be too great a tool for the extremists. Or perhaps not.
(I don't actually follow the politics over there, I just have a general sense from a few Pakistanis.)
> I'm not going to make any kind of normative statement...
Lawyer or psychologist? :)
It's voluntary from the college's point of view. The problem is that things that are voluntary from the school's point of view are things that students who are applying are strongly compelled to do. It's absurd, but higher education admissions are a game of signals, and high school students (And their parents) don't want to risk giving the wrong signals when there are thousands of people competing with them. This means that there's a strong incentive do anything "voluntary" on the application.
The school may not even be thinking this, because schools often think students' calculations about how to get in are just over-the-top and absurd. But the schools should be thinking this, because applicants at competitive schools will almost always make those calculations, no matter that the school says "Don't worry about it so much" in the left hand while saying "We only admit the very best!" in the right hand.
The other important point here is that today they limited the application of life without parole, saying it was cruel and unusual punishment to apply to a juvenile who had not committed a murder. This bring America closer in line with with the human rights standards of the Western World.
Okay, I could understand not needing C if you needed assembly, since it at least makes sure you can figure out what's going on. But when ALL of the languages you're teaching are high-level, it's not a computer science degree, it's just a programming degree. Because science is about understanding how stuff works, and the higher level it is, the less you understand. (Like how you start out with "Everything is made up of atoms." It's kind of true, and maybe it's science in fourth grade. But it's not really true, and when you have a college degree in the science, you should know better.)
> The feds have NO interest whatsoever in providing skill training, no matter what their propaganda tells you. At the FCI where I was, inmates typically slept till lunch, signed false pay sheets claiming 40 hours worked. They thought they were getting over, but it's actualy the feds, who can provide "proof" of "gainfully employed inmates."
> But it's a scam. The BOP/DOJ has a vested interest in the 75% recidivism rate..
It's used as a scam. That doesn't mean it *is* a scam. If justice knew how to lower the recidivism rate 50%, they would do it. Maybe you think they wouldn't, but realize you're seeing it from a very different POV than they are. The inside of a prison doesn't work the way that the people at Justice wish it did, and most of the exposure you get in a prison or as an inmate to people from Justice, or Feds, or even regular cops, is them trying to entrap guards or prisoners into drug deals, or the typical confession scenario. Places where cops act essentially as Judas Iscariot, as a betrayer, because that's what they're trained to do and it's what works in the short-term. But just because they betray doesn't mean they mean evil because of some screwed up incentive structure to want more money for Justice.
Maybe it's a scam for BOP, something they can sell the politicians. When you work in the field a long time, you get used to the recidivism rate, and think most people, you can't really do anything to help. But that doesn't mean they *want* that recidivism rate. There's enough bad sh*t in the world that if all the recidivists went away, you'd still be able to argue for more money for justice than the budget they have now, and there'd still be reasons for it. We have hundreds of thousands of american teens at high risk for being actually enslaved every year, with the human trafficking problem. (Sources: The Polaris Project, River of Innocents, Victor Malarek's The Natashas). Kids who survive hell and get back up again and build their lives. Children who can't build their lives because they've never known a family and they never learned how to build themselves up. There are more than enough problems for Justice. The day there's no more need for the DOJ is the day the DOJ employees have their biggest freaking party ever.
> The decision was not a final judgment, so it is not appealable.
Not immediately appealable, anyway.
For the nonlawyers in the room, summary judgment means basically that somebody wins their argument, or parts of their argument, because even if everything the other guy said was true, the other guy still loses. Like if you ask a kid "Did you throw a rock at Timmy?" And the kid says "I did, but I like throwing rocks!" or "It was a horseshoe, not a rock."
In this case, even if everything Limewire said was true, they still lose. (At least, they still lose everything they lost here.)
The decision can usually be appealed, but only after the trial ends or in rare cases with special permission. Since it influences the outcome of settlement proceedings, and most things settle, they are rarely but not never appealed.
> I understand this joke often gets +5 Funny, even though I don't know what it refers to. So here I go:
> No disassemble Johnny 5!
It's from a 1986 movie, Short Circuit. (There was also a sequel). Fun old family movie about an experimental robot developing a personality. In the second one, there are also bank robbers.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091949/
DNA developing into a robot is the other way round, of course.
Interesting; thank you. :)
Although it still suggests that perhaps standards have risen since 9/11. From the standpoint of the traveller, the question is still one of liberty v. security.
> The whole purpose of the scanners to emasculate and demean the people who pass through them. This should be clear to everyone.
No, that's just how they're used in some cases. Although to be fair, the last time I ran into an abusive and power-hungry TSA employee was pre-9/11, and everyone I've seen in the last few years has been professional, courteous, and often amiable. But I don't travel much.
Scanners are really just a deterrent. Kind of like polygraphs--sure, someone can probably figure out a way around it, but it deters a lot of people from trying things they shouldn't try and catches a few really stupid people. Like Congressional Representatives who have their aid carry a gun for them or multimillionaire basketball players who take their weed through customs, plus a hundred thousand really stupid people we don't hear about because they're not famous.
Sure, most of the time the behavior it deters or catches is probably stuff that doesn't hurt anyone. But that doesn't mean it doesn't serve a function beyond emasculation.
Strangely, that last paragraph may also apply to significant others... (of either gender)
Quoth the article: "The $170,000 machines, which were introduced last year, took some heat from fliers who weren't quite ready to show their bod to government employees... But if this latest incident is any indication, the scanners sound like good news for anti-terrorism and bad news for less-than-average men."
The implication here seems to be that it's okay to eliminate individual privacy rights because only poorly endowed men will complain. Granted, a news-hat was just trying to end on a light note, but treating it lightly undermines the legitimacy of the privacy concern.
I see it more that of course we are responsible for those things because our choices and money pay for them. So we are responsible for trying to fix the problems in those systems.
We would be anyway because I tend to believe we all have a duty to, for example, try to stop or at least diminish slavery.
Either way, it's not about feeling guilty or about blame, it's about either (a) taking responsibility for the negative externalities that we incentivize by our actions, or (b) believing we can be a better world than we are right now and working to make that happen.
Either way, we don't get out of it by saying we have no choice since we can't eliminate all the externalities. Because we do have choice, and that choice lets us cut back on those externalities. (As by using renewable fuels, using products from companies that actively work to prevent slave labor use in their product chains, socially conscious investing, personal philanthropy, and community service).
> from some no-name school?
GMU isn't a no-name school. It's law school is decent, for one. (42 out of about 200 by USNWR, not that their ratings are that determinative, but they give you an idea.) It doesn't have the same brand power nationally as top schools, but it's significantly better than no-namers.
It's not a boy scout badge, it's a cub scout pin. Kids in the cub-scout age range run around and go crazy regardless of whether they have video games. (At least, everyone I knew who had video games at that age ran around and went crazy, too.) Nobody is going to get this pin who doesn't play videogames--it's going to be kids who play videogames already, and they're going to have to at least learn how much the games cost. It doesn't hurt anything and it requires them to learn something. And nobody will seriously take it as a status symbol.
Sculpture, Theater, Cinematography, and Computers are all areas where someone might be interested in working in them one day, and one of the goals of the merit badge system is to introduce people to a wide range of areas. I only know any technical details about fingerprinting because I studied it one afternoon for a merit badge fifteen years ago--I get that knowledge forever, and there's nothing wrong with encouraging young men to learn things from a wide range of careers, activities, or knowledge. They recognize that some badges matter more than others to the scouting program, which is why you have eagle-required badges--but they also let people either earn something for the work they've put into an interest or for learning about a new potential field.
I would certainly be concerned about a video game merit badge on the boy scout level--but at the cub scout level, where it's one of a hundred things that are *really* easy to "earn," and where it still requires you to actually do something, I'm not too concerned about it.
> Terry Childs is a convicted felon, his record wasn't expunged, so the fact stands.
I think the point he was making is that a conviction 25 years in the past shouldn't automagically disqualify someone from a job. A lot changes in 25 years. And we have a lot of crimes we shouldn't have, and a system that's bad in some ways. Simple hypothetical: your local police plant a little pot on you because you're a libertarian who likes police accountability. A little pot, in your state, may be enough for felony intent to distribute. Your lawyer tells you to take the plea bargain to get it down to a misdemeanor, an you're going to--but to take the plea, you don't just have to take the bargain, you have to testify that you really are honestly guilty and you're taking the bargain because you're guilty. So you don't take it because you don't want to lie to the court--or generally don't want to lie. Now you're a felon.
Applies to other crimes, and other circumstances.
Or you do something really stupid when you're a kid. There's an accident, and you kill someone. Think of Garden State, and the latch on the dishwasher. Then you're a felon.
Doesn't mean you don't grow up.
Sure, there's recidivism. But there's also reform.
> Once people accept that morals are relative, the idea that there is a god who dictates morality disintegrates, along with some of the Popes power/influence.
Only if you take moral relativism to its extremes. If you wholly embrace moral relativism, then for the most part you have no morals of your own. (Because morals are fundamentally about what is right or wrong, not necessarily just what is right or wrong for you.)
But if you don't believe in any moral relativism, then you're probably a closed-minded, because you can't accept any system other than your own.
In my experience, good people are always somewhere in the middle. They believe in enough moral relativism to be open minded, but not so much that they're okay with shooting babies. Effectively, they believe in *limits* on moral relativism.
If you and someone else share beliefs in where those limits are, it's a lot easier to be friends with and respect one another. If you disagree, then it gets a lot harder. Sometimes, obviously, this happens without articulation.
God doesn't necessarily disintegrate under any of these systems. He just gets narrowed, to different degrees. In some cases he will disintegrate for you, if you're on the moral relativist spectrum somewhere where you don't believe in him. But if you don't believe in him, then from your POV he's disintegrated anyway. So it's moot until you die, at which point you get proven right or wrong.
> Are you suggesting that the KKK is some sort of devout Christian order? Don't they have a history of bombing Christian churches? This doesn't seem to make much sense.
I admit that I haven't researched the KKK, but its "avowed purpose is to protect the rights and further the interests of White Americans of the Protestant faith by violence and intimidation." (Source: Wikipedia.) (emphasis added).
And I agree. It doesn't make much sense at all.
As to the distinction between convincing people to believe through violence and doing it for some other reason, ultimately I think people do it because they want to or they're trained to or they have an economic motivation, and then they justify it in one of several ways.
In this case, though, we're also not talking about a belief, but an action: depicting Mohammed. It's not murder, but it's still not merely holding a belief--it's acting on a belief.
> can't these people do simple math?
One guy made a stupid mistake. It doesn't mean someone can't do math, it just means he got one math question wrong--the failure wasn't so much the bad math, it was (1) the failure of him to check his math a second time when the vote came out as close as it did, and (2) the fact that they didn't have someone else check it.
It's okay to not notice an extra decimal place on a first approximation. It's not okay if it suddenly might matter because you're within a vote of not passing. When votes or scores actually make a difference, you have to either be especially rigorous or you have to make sure the information that actually makes the result indeterminate will never see the light of day. (The latter is only appropriate in a few cases, as where it doesn't change anything important and everyone thinks the decision has already been made. IT doesn't apply to zoning changes where millions of dollars are at issue. It might apply to some game scores.)
> Because while Christians will turn the other cheek, and Buddhists likewise, Muslims will fucking kill you.
It's rather a shame that this was modded informative, because it means we don't actually know that much about Islam here. Yes, there are Islamic extremists who will kill you. We had Christian extremists who would kill you for being Muslim for hundreds of years--the Crusades. We still have Christian extremists who burn crosses to scare people they don't like. The extremism on either side uses religion to justify its extremism, but it's not an inherent part of any faith. People have killed for Judaism, but I don't think any of the Jews I've known ever have. (I don't recall offhand if any of them have been in the IDF, and there are plenty of complicating factors, but the point stands. The IDF is not an extremist group by any stretch of the imagination, and I believe they try to do things correctly, but they also commit war crimes from time to time. Some militaries are worse about it than others. My rough estimate would be they're worse than the US but much better than, for example, Sudan. Though everybody's better than Sudan. Mmm... a little offtopic, though many militaries look to the will of God for justification, officially or unofficially. As does nonconventional warfare/terrorism.)
Anyway, the point is that some Christians kill too, and most Muslims don't. There may be more Muslims who will kill you for satire right now, but we shouldn't be generalizing because it polarizes us, and that's a bad thing. We want to bring people together on common interest in--for example--not being blown up. Living well. We don't want to drive wedges between America and the rest of the world by generalizing "America good. Muslims kill."
The interesting question is whether they censored it because it will be offensive, or because they'll get killed. To my mind the former is legitimate, if they decide to do that. (It's their network, and it's okay to be polite--even in comedy.) The latter is a much less satisfying and more probable possibility.
> A university is not a democracy. They are free to set the entry requirements as they see fit, so long as they don't violate civil rights. Professors are free to set the course requirements as they see fit, so long as they don't violate the university's requirements and guidelines.
True, a University is not a democracy. But that doesn't mean there isn't a difference between an institution that respects its members and one that doesn't, nor between people who respect students or colleagues or co-workers and people who don't. Merely because I have the freedom to insult someone by my words or actions does not mean that I should.
> Professors are free to set the course requirements as they see fit, so long as they don't violate the university's requirements and guidelines.
But a university might decide whether or not to make a service available for a professor, or to pay for it for his class. Likewise, a professor's decisions should be guided at least in part by some sense of morality. And there are also cases where particular standards may be set narrowly by universities or departments.
A professor may set insulting standards or policies in his course. They may be within university regulations, but nevertheless insulting--either because they assume a student is cheating, or require him to do something that assumes he is untruthful.
Some schools are less trusting than others. So are some professors. So are some teachers. In Grade school, I had a teacher who insisted I must have cheated because my handwriting changed as it got closer to the end of the page, getting smaller and smaller. She had no business teaching children if that was how she treated her students.
While the issue is less critical at University, where you expect brilliant professors with eccentricities or poor social skills to be part of the mix and students are more resilient, there is still a way of doing things where you avoid insulting people. Just because something isn't a democracy doesn't mean it should go around insulting people.
My point, in saying that the system assumed the students' guilt, was not that it was somehow state action, nor that it was undemocratic, but was rather that the system was bad. One might say inherently immoral. As is any system where you assume guilt and require proof of innocence.
> It's the easy assignments where that might be tempting--they're so mind-numbingnly dull.
Compilers! Supposedly one of the hardest courses in the department, it was boring and wrote and no more than long lines of code implemeting a particular compiler with nearly no room for creativity. We even had to remove some of the only cool stuff we did on the project--where by cool I mean insane and kind of awesome--like dynamically rewriting class instance pointers. It was wonderful, but of course it made the code helpelessly compiler-defendant. So we were drones.
Yes, it's not what you'd call robust code, but we weren't going for robust code. We just wanted to write fun code that happened to do what the assignment was.
> on some really hard assignments where I just had to reuse code
Really weird. It's the easy assignments where that might be tempting--they're so mind-numbingnly dull.
At my undergrad, I successfuly argued against allowing this kind of automated scanning program. Rather than punishing students if the professors discovered cheating, these programs actively assume every student is cheating and try to prove them innocent. This offends me. It's like accusing every professor of plagiarism until he shows fairly conclusively that he hasn't submitted somebody else's article. One professor had the audacity to ask if I was fighting the system because I cheat. He meant it jokingly, but it was still as offensive as hell.