Well, I'm not sure that's intollerance. Indignance, perhaps.
There are those who promote gay rights who do try to equate their struggle for social acceptance and marriage rights with the frequent lynchings that went on in Harlem back in the day. If I were a black man who lived through such hard times, I would probably be deeply offended by that, regardless of my position on their cause.
I'm all for civil liberties for all people, regardless of what their particular race, religion or kink happens to be, but I also recognize that gay men have a higher average income than the general population, which is one (imprefect) indication that what descrimination does still exist in our society is rather isolated trivial compared to the struggle of blacks in America.
I'm not saying this guy isn't an ass... I'm just saying that this one quote is not really sufficient evidence that he is. (Especially when it is quoted and emphasized by a web site from his opposition. It's one thing if he said it answering somebody's question about his feelings on the matter, and is now being quoted without any context. It's quite another if he's printing and selling T-shirts with that same quote on it.)
The funny thing is, the 3/5 thing was an anti-slavery law which was intended to help black people.
Counting slaves as "persons" for the purpose of assigning house seats meant that pro-slavery states would be over-represented in Washington.
Northerners pointed out that Southern legislators clearly did not represent the interests of slaves, and slaves could not vote, therefore they should not be counted when dividing up electoral numbers at all.
The Southern states fought back, and the compromise was that 3/5 of the slave population would count towards the general population for the purpose of establishing electoral votes.
This allowed, among other things, the eventual election of Abraham Lincoln as President.
Um... I can reverse what you just said and be just as right. Watch:
Religion is not a homosexuality. It is a choice you can make. You can go in and out of the group based on how you feel. You do not have to be able to prove it. Homosexuality is protected because it is homosexuality and there are consequences to the choice. Repression can involve violent uprising by the gay people to maintain their ability to be what they are.
Religion is something you could claim to be or not claim to be totally based on how you want to avoid or not avoid something.
If I found that religious people could get scholarships that i could not, i could just tell everyone I was religious.
"Homosexuals have never been considered one-fifth of a human being."
Discrimination 'doesn't exist', huh?
Call me an idiot if you like, but I fail to see how that quote is evidence of descrimination.
I'm not saying descrimination doesn't exist, I'm just wondering how his insistance that gays have never been thought of as mere fractions of humans is an example of intollerance.
Ignorance, perhaps... but then it's an ignorance which I share, because I've never heard of such a thing either.
As one who does not agree with your point, I wish more people would address your argument, instead of simply modding you down as Flamebait or whatever.
Getting to the argument:
It would be entirely inapropriate for a non-Christian boss to expect you to "hide" all signs of your Christian faith while at work. It's a part of who you are, and even applying social pressure within the office on you to not express that part of yourself is descriminatory against your religion. If you have to live in dread every day that somebody might discover you are a Christian (perhaps even hear a rumor about it) and your chances of promotion or advancement within the company would be damaged by it, then you are being descriminated against, even though you shouldn't be expressing your religion at work anyway!
Secondly, your statement, "nobody is getting fired, nobody strikes out at an interview because he/she is GLBT" is completely untrue. Even in states which have laws against such descrimination, it still happens. Companies lose lawsuits every year over this issue, so unless you are prepared to believe that the courts awarded damages for trumped-up charges in every single one of those cases, it obviously is something which goes on.
Finally, when you say "Sex isn't a non-variable," what on Earth does that mean and what does it have to do with human rights?
For the record: I'm a Christian myself, but I recognize that the rules of my church and the rules of my country ought not be the same thing, as my country governs millions of people who are not part of my church.
Do you know what my favorite moment in the story is?
When Arther Dent, stuck on past Earth, announces that he has decided to go mad.
Ford suddenly appears and agrees that it's a good idea.
What I like about that moment is that I didn't really care for anything which came after it. Don't get me wrong, the prose was still very funny, but all this stuff of Aurther learning to fly, a planet-wise parody of what a boring sport cricket is, the truck-driving rain god, and the destruction of all possible alternate realities... It just wasn't up to snuff with the book material spawned from the original radio plays.
So, I have decided the following:
Arthur really did go mad at that moment. Ford never showed up. Arthur never learned to fly. Mattress creatures did not flollop. The reincarnated plant did not seek out revenge against Arthur. None of it happened. It was all just the delusions of Arthur's madness.
Looking at the final three and a half books of the trilogy in this light makes them much more enjoyable for me, especially since it discards the "Goddammit! I'm not writing a sixth book ever! Fuck all you drooling fanboys who will demand that my publisher lean on me to write more!" fatalistic ending. YMMV.
For that matter, one could take this premise and craft a fairly amusing fan-fic which picks up just as Arthur recovers his sanity, still stuck among the cave men.
Personally, I plan on seeing it, but I also plan on going out of my way to read every last negative review and whiny Aint-It-Cool-News tirade which warns of how bad it is before seeing it.
The more I lower my expectations going in, the better the chances that I might extract a little pleasure out of watching what is bound to be a very flawed adaptation of my absolute favorite childhood novel.
It is starting to get a little offtopic, but you can't max out your 401K, you can give up to 100% of your salary.
I maxed out what would be fully matched under my vesting plan, and put my other retirement money elsewhere. 401K's are not that great a deal once you go past the company freebies.
What about living your life? What if we don't make it to retirement and never enjoyed ourseleves?
W3rd.
If I bothered to maintain a "friends list," you would be on it for that one bit of insight alone.
I spent a week of vacation and a pile of money to tear apart my main living room and effectively turn it into a movie theater which also allows me to watch TV and play computer games on a screen which dwarfs every other object in my house. While I was at it, I converted the dining room into a poker room. In short, I've completely canabalized a suburban one-family house to create a very expensive bachelor pad.
It probably also lowered the resale value of my house by almost as much money as I put into it.
"Most people" would never do something like that. I, on the other hand, am completely thrilled with the result.
I may be a lot of things, but one thing I am not is "most people."
he probably earns $50K, and still spent too much on television, hasn't maxed out his 401K, IRA or savings. Hopefully he didn't put it on his creditcard.
Wrong on all counts. I make more than that, I didn't spend "too much" (IMHO), I have maxed out my retirement plans, and I paid cash.
How? Well, for starters I don't spend a lot on some of the things that other folks go nuts on: I drive an old car, so I have no financed car payments to worry about. I generally don't eat overpriced fast food. My job allows me to wear jeans and t-shirts, so I spend almost no money on nice clothes. The list goes on.
Secondly, I'm not married. I'm not saying marriage is a bad thing. If I meet the right girl, I'm sure I'll jump in with both feet... but it is phenominally expensive, especially if that marriage produces children and/or ends in divorce. I could book a standing appointment with a high-priced hooker every weekend for the amount of money that getting married has cost some people I know. Just the wedding ceremony and the ring alone is more money then I spent on my home improvements this year.
Spending $950 to watch television is a sad, sad sign of your addiction.
Guilty as charged! My house is the box I keep my TV in.
How much did you pay to get those extra pixels in the HDTV?
Seeing as I also use the HDTV as my 119" computer monitor, you could say I paid all that money for more than one purpose.
Counting the remodeling in my house to accomodate the new home theater with multiple rows of seating (I often entertain friends with "movie nights"), the total tab came in around five or six grand.
I have no kids to put through college, so I'm free to waste my money on things you don't value.
How much do you pay per year for cable?
$0.
HDTV is free over the air in every major city in the US.
First of all, stop capitalizing "libertarianism" when speaking of my political philosophy. I am a libertarian, not a member of the Libertarian Party.
Secondly, perhaps you should do a little more reading on "what libertarianism truly means" before you start lecturing me on it, because you clearly only half-understand most of the principles.
Thirdly, I never said anything which advocates your ad absurdum scenarios. Stop knocking down straw men and acting like you've proven anything.
Yes, but you have to compare three years to the seriousness of the offence
No I don't.
"Eye for an eye" is an obsolete, punishment-based concept of law enforcement.
The point of penalties for crime is deterrence, and the factor you are leaving out when evaluating the level of deterrence is the difficulty of arresting those who break that specific law.
Shoplifters are easy to catch. Anybody who shoplists often enough will eventually get arrested.
Those who host torrents of DVD rips are considerably more difficult and expensive to catch. Even if you can track down who put the file out there, there's no guarantee they will even be located in the US.
Great idea, when/how exactly do you pronounce Disney *dead*?
"The Author" != "the IP owner"
Copyright needs to be tied to the life of the actual person who actually wrote it. They could transfer that copyright, but it would still expire a few years after their death.
You do know that "libertarian ideals" is what allowed things like the RIAA and MPAA, along with Halliburton and Diebold, to form in the first place, right?
You are making the all-too-common mistake of confusing "libertarianism" with "corporate anarchy."
Understandable and forgivable, but please become more informed before accusing me of being a corporate shill. That would be great, thanks.
Whichever side you're on in the copyright debate, you have to agree this legislation is draconian and excessive, to say the least."
I am on the side of reducing copyright to a more reasonable time-frame. Five years after the death of the author would be plenty, IMHO.
Were I a King of the US, I would declare that getting rid of copyright entirely would be even better. People wrote some pretty good stuff before the concept of copyright existed, so I disagree that it would all disappear after it was wiped out.
And I do not "have to agree" that it's "draconian" and in fact, I don't agree.
If you are going to bother to have copyright law matter at all, the only way to effectively enforce it is to come down hard on the first person to illegally distribute it. Once it's scattered all over usenet and various torrent sites, it's too late to do jack shit about it.
So, unless everybody wants to agree to my kooky libertarian ideal of abolishing copyright entirely (and we all know that such a thing will never happen), then we need a big hammer to enforce the law as it exists.
Backwards compatibility is a given for most who follow this. Specifying that the economy model likely will not included it also goes to this assumption.
Both are foolish assumptions.
1. You do not need a hard drive for backwards compatability. A flash memory card can spoof a hard drive just fine. (In fact, there are several on the market which do exactly that on the current X-Box in order to offer game portability.)
2. The current X-Box is an Intel x86 chip and an nVidia graphics card which most X-Box games were specifically optimized for. The new one will use a PowerPC chip with an ATI graphics card. Not just different chipsets and motherboards, but different instruction sets, different endian orders, and completely different video card. All of these are far greater obstacles to backwards compatability than the presence or lack of a specific type of media drive. If there are two versions of the X-Box 360, it seems extremely unlikely they will be able to pull it off for either of them.
I thought of that combination as well, but the macmini has a huge fault: no digital audio out.
You mean no built in digital audio out.
Three letters to consider before dismissing the mini:
USB
Yes, the better USB digital audio options are a little expensive, but a mini with such a gadget is still almost a thousand dollars cheaper than the lowest-end G5 tower.
That's $950, without any upgrades. Holy crap, how can you afford that?
I have this thing called a job.
If you can't afford that, you probably can't afford a good HDTV, either.
Also, the EyeTV 500 is only $300. (Although once you add $200 for the GB of RAM, and a few bucks here and there for things like a DVI-HDMI cable and a USB-TOSLink audio card, it ends up being well over a grand for the whole sh'bang.)
You can live very well in some parts of Asia on $1 per hour.
Call me crazy, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Look at Lineage. The Japanese (high incomes, high cost of living, very limited free time) play the game for fun, and buy 'leet gear from loot farmers in China (low incomes, low standard of living, no better way to make money available.) Everybody gets what they want, including SOE, because Lineage outsells all US-based MMORPGs.
Want a game where professional farming doesn't go on? Play the ones that were designed in such a way that it's not very profitable to do so. World of Warcraft made some very good decisions along those lines.
Slashdot Mirror
I like it too, and also like the original version of The Office.
... and that wraps up another Hollywood Minute. :)
I especially like the early episodes. Those were, by far, the best of the bunch!
You know the ones I mean... Back when the show was called "Made in Canada"
(Ah, crap... two obscure pop-culture references in one post. This thing will be modded into offtopic oblivion in no time. Oh well. Burn, karma, burn!)
Well, I'm not sure that's intollerance. Indignance, perhaps.
There are those who promote gay rights who do try to equate their struggle for social acceptance and marriage rights with the frequent lynchings that went on in Harlem back in the day. If I were a black man who lived through such hard times, I would probably be deeply offended by that, regardless of my position on their cause.
I'm all for civil liberties for all people, regardless of what their particular race, religion or kink happens to be, but I also recognize that gay men have a higher average income than the general population, which is one (imprefect) indication that what descrimination does still exist in our society is rather isolated trivial compared to the struggle of blacks in America.
I'm not saying this guy isn't an ass... I'm just saying that this one quote is not really sufficient evidence that he is. (Especially when it is quoted and emphasized by a web site from his opposition. It's one thing if he said it answering somebody's question about his feelings on the matter, and is now being quoted without any context. It's quite another if he's printing and selling T-shirts with that same quote on it.)
The funny thing is, the 3/5 thing was an anti-slavery law which was intended to help black people.
Counting slaves as "persons" for the purpose of assigning house seats meant that pro-slavery states would be over-represented in Washington.
Northerners pointed out that Southern legislators clearly did not represent the interests of slaves, and slaves could not vote, therefore they should not be counted when dividing up electoral numbers at all.
The Southern states fought back, and the compromise was that 3/5 of the slave population would count towards the general population for the purpose of establishing electoral votes.
This allowed, among other things, the eventual election of Abraham Lincoln as President.
It's worse then that. Now they're floridating the water to taint our precious bodily fluids!
Um... I can reverse what you just said and be just as right. Watch:
Religion is not a homosexuality. It is a choice you can make. You can go in and out of the group based on how you feel. You do not have to be able to prove it. Homosexuality is protected because it is homosexuality and there are consequences to the choice. Repression can involve violent uprising by the gay people to maintain their ability to be what they are.
Religion is something you could claim to be or not claim to be totally based on how you want to avoid or not avoid something.
If I found that religious people could get scholarships that i could not, i could just tell everyone I was religious.
"Homosexuals have never been considered one-fifth of a human being."
Discrimination 'doesn't exist', huh?
Call me an idiot if you like, but I fail to see how that quote is evidence of descrimination.
I'm not saying descrimination doesn't exist, I'm just wondering how his insistance that gays have never been thought of as mere fractions of humans is an example of intollerance.
Ignorance, perhaps... but then it's an ignorance which I share, because I've never heard of such a thing either.
As one who does not agree with your point, I wish more people would address your argument, instead of simply modding you down as Flamebait or whatever.
Getting to the argument:
It would be entirely inapropriate for a non-Christian boss to expect you to "hide" all signs of your Christian faith while at work. It's a part of who you are, and even applying social pressure within the office on you to not express that part of yourself is descriminatory against your religion. If you have to live in dread every day that somebody might discover you are a Christian (perhaps even hear a rumor about it) and your chances of promotion or advancement within the company would be damaged by it, then you are being descriminated against, even though you shouldn't be expressing your religion at work anyway!
Secondly, your statement, "nobody is getting fired, nobody strikes out at an interview because he/she is GLBT" is completely untrue. Even in states which have laws against such descrimination, it still happens. Companies lose lawsuits every year over this issue, so unless you are prepared to believe that the courts awarded damages for trumped-up charges in every single one of those cases, it obviously is something which goes on.
Finally, when you say "Sex isn't a non-variable," what on Earth does that mean and what does it have to do with human rights?
For the record: I'm a Christian myself, but I recognize that the rules of my church and the rules of my country ought not be the same thing, as my country governs millions of people who are not part of my church.
compared to Arthur, Ford was an absolute nut.
Do you know what my favorite moment in the story is?
When Arther Dent, stuck on past Earth, announces that he has decided to go mad.
Ford suddenly appears and agrees that it's a good idea.
What I like about that moment is that I didn't really care for anything which came after it. Don't get me wrong, the prose was still very funny, but all this stuff of Aurther learning to fly, a planet-wise parody of what a boring sport cricket is, the truck-driving rain god, and the destruction of all possible alternate realities... It just wasn't up to snuff with the book material spawned from the original radio plays.
So, I have decided the following:
Arthur really did go mad at that moment. Ford never showed up. Arthur never learned to fly. Mattress creatures did not flollop. The reincarnated plant did not seek out revenge against Arthur. None of it happened. It was all just the delusions of Arthur's madness.
Looking at the final three and a half books of the trilogy in this light makes them much more enjoyable for me, especially since it discards the "Goddammit! I'm not writing a sixth book ever! Fuck all you drooling fanboys who will demand that my publisher lean on me to write more!" fatalistic ending. YMMV.
For that matter, one could take this premise and craft a fairly amusing fan-fic which picks up just as Arthur recovers his sanity, still stuck among the cave men.
Well, he also called it a "mess."
Personally, I plan on seeing it, but I also plan on going out of my way to read every last negative review and whiny Aint-It-Cool-News tirade which warns of how bad it is before seeing it.
The more I lower my expectations going in, the better the chances that I might extract a little pleasure out of watching what is bound to be a very flawed adaptation of my absolute favorite childhood novel.
It is starting to get a little offtopic, but you can't max out your 401K, you can give up to 100% of your salary.
I maxed out what would be fully matched under my vesting plan, and put my other retirement money elsewhere. 401K's are not that great a deal once you go past the company freebies.
What about living your life? What if we don't make it to retirement and never enjoyed ourseleves?
W3rd.
If I bothered to maintain a "friends list," you would be on it for that one bit of insight alone.
If he's like most people...
You can stop right there, bucko.
I spent a week of vacation and a pile of money to tear apart my main living room and effectively turn it into a movie theater which also allows me to watch TV and play computer games on a screen which dwarfs every other object in my house. While I was at it, I converted the dining room into a poker room. In short, I've completely canabalized a suburban one-family house to create a very expensive bachelor pad.
It probably also lowered the resale value of my house by almost as much money as I put into it.
"Most people" would never do something like that. I, on the other hand, am completely thrilled with the result.
I may be a lot of things, but one thing I am not is "most people."
he probably earns $50K, and still spent too much on television, hasn't maxed out his 401K, IRA or savings. Hopefully he didn't put it on his creditcard.
Wrong on all counts. I make more than that, I didn't spend "too much" (IMHO), I have maxed out my retirement plans, and I paid cash.
How? Well, for starters I don't spend a lot on some of the things that other folks go nuts on: I drive an old car, so I have no financed car payments to worry about. I generally don't eat overpriced fast food. My job allows me to wear jeans and t-shirts, so I spend almost no money on nice clothes. The list goes on.
Secondly, I'm not married. I'm not saying marriage is a bad thing. If I meet the right girl, I'm sure I'll jump in with both feet... but it is phenominally expensive, especially if that marriage produces children and/or ends in divorce. I could book a standing appointment with a high-priced hooker every weekend for the amount of money that getting married has cost some people I know. Just the wedding ceremony and the ring alone is more money then I spent on my home improvements this year.
Spending $950 to watch television is a sad, sad sign of your addiction.
Guilty as charged! My house is the box I keep my TV in.
How much did you pay to get those extra pixels in the HDTV?
Seeing as I also use the HDTV as my 119" computer monitor, you could say I paid all that money for more than one purpose.
Counting the remodeling in my house to accomodate the new home theater with multiple rows of seating (I often entertain friends with "movie nights"), the total tab came in around five or six grand.
I have no kids to put through college, so I'm free to waste my money on things you don't value.
How much do you pay per year for cable?
$0.
HDTV is free over the air in every major city in the US.
Is it worth it?
Good heavens, yes!
How about five years the last member of the group dies?
Or the first. Either suits me, to be honest.
Are these things so hard to figure out?
First of all, stop capitalizing "libertarianism" when speaking of my political philosophy. I am a libertarian, not a member of the Libertarian Party.
Secondly, perhaps you should do a little more reading on "what libertarianism truly means" before you start lecturing me on it, because you clearly only half-understand most of the principles.
Thirdly, I never said anything which advocates your ad absurdum scenarios. Stop knocking down straw men and acting like you've proven anything.
Yes, but you have to compare three years to the seriousness of the offence
No I don't.
"Eye for an eye" is an obsolete, punishment-based concept of law enforcement.
The point of penalties for crime is deterrence, and the factor you are leaving out when evaluating the level of deterrence is the difficulty of arresting those who break that specific law.
Shoplifters are easy to catch. Anybody who shoplists often enough will eventually get arrested.
Those who host torrents of DVD rips are considerably more difficult and expensive to catch. Even if you can track down who put the file out there, there's no guarantee they will even be located in the US.
Like Einstein, I'm a fan of elegant solutions.
Count me as on board for that idea, if my opnion ever begins to matter.
Great idea, when/how exactly do you pronounce Disney *dead*?
"The Author" != "the IP owner"
Copyright needs to be tied to the life of the actual person who actually wrote it. They could transfer that copyright, but it would still expire a few years after their death.
Any more questions?
You do know that "libertarian ideals" is what allowed things like the RIAA and MPAA, along with Halliburton and Diebold, to form in the first place, right?
You are making the all-too-common mistake of confusing "libertarianism" with "corporate anarchy."
Understandable and forgivable, but please become more informed before accusing me of being a corporate shill. That would be great, thanks.
it would not be as compact.
Have you seen the M-Audio transit? It's smaller than a wallet, and hides nicely right behind your receiver.
The same goes for most of the competing products.
Think of it as a USB-TOSLink adapter cable with a slight bulge in the middle.
Whichever side you're on in the copyright debate, you have to agree this legislation is draconian and excessive, to say the least."
I am on the side of reducing copyright to a more reasonable time-frame. Five years after the death of the author would be plenty, IMHO.
Were I a King of the US, I would declare that getting rid of copyright entirely would be even better. People wrote some pretty good stuff before the concept of copyright existed, so I disagree that it would all disappear after it was wiped out.
And I do not "have to agree" that it's "draconian" and in fact, I don't agree.
If you are going to bother to have copyright law matter at all, the only way to effectively enforce it is to come down hard on the first person to illegally distribute it. Once it's scattered all over usenet and various torrent sites, it's too late to do jack shit about it.
So, unless everybody wants to agree to my kooky libertarian ideal of abolishing copyright entirely (and we all know that such a thing will never happen), then we need a big hammer to enforce the law as it exists.
Backwards compatibility is a given for most who follow this. Specifying that the economy model likely will not included it also goes to this assumption.
Both are foolish assumptions.
1. You do not need a hard drive for backwards compatability. A flash memory card can spoof a hard drive just fine. (In fact, there are several on the market which do exactly that on the current X-Box in order to offer game portability.)
2. The current X-Box is an Intel x86 chip and an nVidia graphics card which most X-Box games were specifically optimized for. The new one will use a PowerPC chip with an ATI graphics card. Not just different chipsets and motherboards, but different instruction sets, different endian orders, and completely different video card. All of these are far greater obstacles to backwards compatability than the presence or lack of a specific type of media drive. If there are two versions of the X-Box 360, it seems extremely unlikely they will be able to pull it off for either of them.
I thought of that combination as well, but the macmini has a huge fault: no digital audio out.
You mean no built in digital audio out.
Three letters to consider before dismissing the mini:
USB
Yes, the better USB digital audio options are a little expensive, but a mini with such a gadget is still almost a thousand dollars cheaper than the lowest-end G5 tower.
That's $950, without any upgrades. Holy crap, how can you afford that?
I have this thing called a job.
If you can't afford that, you probably can't afford a good HDTV, either.
Also, the EyeTV 500 is only $300. (Although once you add $200 for the GB of RAM, and a few bucks here and there for things like a DVI-HDMI cable and a USB-TOSLink audio card, it ends up being well over a grand for the whole sh'bang.)
Yes, far too silly.
... and some of her friends.
Nobody enjoys a good laugh more than I do.
Except perhaps my wife...
Come to think of it, most people enjoy a good laugh more than I do, but that's beside the point!
You can live very well in some parts of Asia on $1 per hour.
Call me crazy, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Look at Lineage. The Japanese (high incomes, high cost of living, very limited free time) play the game for fun, and buy 'leet gear from loot farmers in China (low incomes, low standard of living, no better way to make money available.) Everybody gets what they want, including SOE, because Lineage outsells all US-based MMORPGs.
Want a game where professional farming doesn't go on? Play the ones that were designed in such a way that it's not very profitable to do so. World of Warcraft made some very good decisions along those lines.