Verizon did want to hand over names and IPs, and I can assure you they have much more legal firepower than a college...
Verizon, as a large corporation, may have astronomically more money than MIT et al, but this doesn't necessarily make the cases equivalent. Verizon's refusal to submit is based on simple market pressure -- the fear that if they don't make a show of protecting the heretofore assumed privacy of their users [laughable as that may be], then a significant number of users will defect to other providers.
Education institutions, on the other hand, have previously existing restrictions on handling and protecting student records as defined by FERPA. As the article states, MIT expresses willingness to comply with properly issued subpoenas. Essentially, these institutions are asking the courts to establish which law has primacy, FERPA or DMCA, because the current situation potentially leaves them open to lawsuits brought by students over violation of privacy as outlined in FERPA if they comply with the DMCA-based information requests.
I am a researcher by profession. The cases cited in the article are examples of poor search technique, not poor indexing algorithms. Anyone who puts in scattershot single terms with no site limitations deserves the incredibly skewed and uninformative results they get. Putting in a single word [especially common words like "apple"] to a search engine hasn't been a good technique since about 1996.
You want information on, say, the nutritional value of apples? Go to google and try a well-formed search query such as:
nutrition apples site:.org [there are many other ways you could form this and almost any query]
Coming from MSN, who naturally want you to use their native search function, this article's assertions are doubly suspect.
lol, i don't really expect you to believe me when i say that i ain't chris vrenna. but if you look at my comment history, you'll see that it was only after 9/11 that i drifted over to the dark side of comments. before that i always tried to Say Something Meaningful. the crapflood of online discussion that ballooned out of those events really turned me off. i used to quietly post occasional thoughts on k5, and for a while i was a plastic.com poli/soc junkie, but for now i just don't see much value in discussion. people's feelings change because circumstances force them to, and at this point in my life i need my human interaction to be more than entertainment. but whoever chris vrenna was, if he sounds that convincingly like me he must be a Great Soul, indeed.
lots of love. try not to squander it, because soon you'll be dead.
Please don't dignify Trent Reznor by referring to him as "who". He is one of the sorriest excuses for an "artist" produced by the mid-90s generation. He's like hair-satan-metal of the 80s, he pumps out wave after wave of same-sounding screaming angry crap, which sells like hotcakes to 13-year-old upper middle class kids who are mad 'cause mum and dad won't let them smoke dope in their bedroom -- they actually make them go OUTSIDE to get high! Fucking Oppressive Bastards!! "I can't wait until they give me my measley $25 weekly allowance so I can go buy another album with music that echoes the dark gothic void of my black soul."
Oh wait, this is slashdot, not kuro5hin. I just pissed off every regular poster here.... Hey boys, your Uncle Jack will probably buy you both weed and NIN if you let him put on the Santa suit and cornhole you like last christmas.
Personally, I think that if this is such a problem for all these people, they should all just get together and go buy an island somewhere so they can leave the rest of the world alone. I really resent some nut who moves into a town and expects the whole town to bow to his every wacked out whim.
in a sense, "they" have been doing exactly that for thousands of years, to only temporary benefit. in recent history, the severely limited powers of the US federal government were designed by political geniuses who wished people, cities, states, i.e. "local" societies, to preserve near-total self-determination as long as they universally honored the basic political/moral freedoms enumerated in the first 8 amendments.
now that the federales operate without limit, americans, too, are beginning to face the question, "where can i live a reasonable life according to my principles without tyranny?"
as waco amply demonstrated, if their way of life was viewed as a threat to the way of life that sustains the government, they indeed would need to buy an island somewhere outside of governmental influence [unlike colonialists throughout time who staked claims solely through military superiority, there is no longer any usable land that doesn't necessitate "purchase" from some person or group].
historically speaking, however, there is no evidence that the protection of a new frontier lasts more than a few, short generations.
in the future, anyone wishing to create and preserve what they believe to be a morally, technologically, or medically pristine community will need to either have a few billion dollars with which to "buy an island somewhere" [not to mention an elite force of diplomat-lobbyists skilled in international law to protect the commune's right to exist, or at least to convince other governments to provide that protection], or they will have to somehow convince their federal establishments to cede regulatory powers back to local establishments. of course, such an arrangement has its own set of problems, the most important of which being that governments never voluntarily cede to civilians powers they have taken for themselves.
American style would call for "period." Morons! and not "period". Morons! Interesting that you punctuated in the Brit style that you don't seem to care for.
i am an american and was "educated" in american schools. i always fought with my teachers about placement of end punctuation vis-a-vis the quotation marks. my sophomore year in high school i finally decided that i was going to place the period/exclamation/question outside the quotes, and if they wanted to deduct points i really didn't care. this was bad for my grades but good for my character, because i learned that being deliberately wrong can be satisfying.
of course, these days, postpostpostmodern formlessness has eaten my writing habits -- i mean, i can't remember when the last time was that i wrote anything that wasn't email or requests for video section reposts on a.b.m.e.m.
Your "jobless self" might reconsider living a lush lifestyle that drives you to spend all your money on computer hardware and electronic toys and cable television and then leave yourself unable to afford net access for your various gadgets.
The concept of Opprtunity Cost is universal to all decisions, all systems. It sounds like you may have simply misjudged the difference between your unlimited options and your limited resources.
yes, it's probably good to make people more conservation-minded of their usage, so that they don't sit around all day hogging bandwidth doing useless stuff unless they are over 25 years old and have real jobs that pay enough to feed the net-addiction.
of course, you have just shredded the business model of streaming media content providers and advert-based blogs.
who cares how easily aircraft can be redesigned with safer fuel -- the government, under threat of arrest, confiscation, and imprisonment, is taking your tax dollars and giving them to the airline companies. as the multibillion-dollar Star Wars project has confirmed, the government has no qualms about spending the money it takes from you without your permission.
]]Most likely line numbers, because he cut and pasted from another site (not that there is anything wrong with that:P)
those numbers are the verse numbers as marked in most editions of the christian bible; as cuttededed and pasteded from bible.com
all this damn computer work has given me a moderate RSI, so I try not to type big paragraphs of text that can be pasted from elsewhere. why duplicate the typing effort somebody else has already done? think of it as "open-source" typing. hehe, okay that was silly but oh well...
i couldn't help but remember this lovely little story from, wait for it..., the bible:
"And behold, one came up to him, saying, "Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?" 17 And he said to him, "Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments." 18 He said to him, "Which?" And Jesus said, "You shall not kill, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, 19 Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself." 20 The young man said to him, "All these I have observed; what do I still lack?" 21 Jesus said to him, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." 22 When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions. 23 And Jesus said to his disciples, "Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
Aye, Verily do I also say unto thee, it will be easier for Dancing Boy Bands to get respect on the College Radio circuit than for Americans to give up their divertainments in order to [re]gain peace and freedom.
Not willing to fight for your rights? Then this is what you get. Even if you are willing to(in the US, anyway), not enough of your fellow non-voters are, so give up.
I used to only make that comment in an ironic fashion [i.e., the lame attempt to shock/offend others/yourself out of their/your inaction], but now I can say it with total sincerity. I think there's already too much momentum in the degenerate parts of "the system" to be stopped and rebuffed by the socially brilliant, powerful parts of "the system".
ps postmodernity will be the death of postmodern humanity
pps log rolls over we'll all be dead
ppps Adventure Frightens Me. Buy more stuff to weigh me down.
pppps The first rule of emotional self-cannabilization is, you always do talk about self-cannabilization
It has become far too common recently for people to immediately blame things on Islamic Militants as a knee-jerk reaction.
I wholeheartedly concur. Nowadays, people have begun to treat Muslims as the bogeymen to be dragged up whenever something is needed to be justified or explained as "evil". There are many different psychological theories as to why whitewashed america is turning more and more to the us-vs-them mentality. Some claim this growing tendency as a byproduct of the evolutionary pressure to quickly categorize things into categories such as "dangerous/painful".
History describes the years around 2000 C.E. to be the climax of american military and cultural terrorism before its inevitable decline.
"The proles comprising the largest portion of the population were lied to extensively by their aristocracy, which during the 250 years of its existence had brokered its insatiable appetite for power through military land grabs, treacherously broken treaties, and financial and paramilitary operations, continuing through the years leading up to 2010 when, in response to the undeniable holocaust being perpetrated by some of their rulers as well as a great spiritual awakening, the middle classes began to convert to Hinduism, Sufic Islam, Buddhism [with a high rates of
Soka Gakkai practice among nonwhites], and Bahai, as well as a mass return to the quietly devout christianity which settled parts of north america.
It was only after the nihilist-capitalist government was itself reformed by the rising tide of tens of millions of muslim pacifists [who, taking the nonviolent resistance doctrines practiced by Gandhi and MLK, successfully leveraged their solidarity to bring the society to a halt, forcing it to re-evaluate its truculent foreign policies] that any evidence pertaining to who was informed and involved in the late-2001 attack on several locations essential to the operation of the military-industrial regime then in power could be unearthed."
"In view of the distortion and suppression of facts practiced by all governments during their periodic acts of violence against humanity, some began to speculate that the incredible secrecy and ease with which the attacks were planned and carried out could possibly be attributed to very delicately placed double agents in key resistance cells operating across the north american continent. Through this infiltration, hard-line paramilitary extremists throughout the US Federal Establishment and other world governments might have been able to subvert the chain of communication between those abroad desperately trying to have their voices heard and all of our human brothers and sisters fighting for justice and independence, trying to slow the deadly Imperialist Juggernaut from the inside, through the still nominally democratic structures available there. It's possible that many of those trying to effect nonviolent change in America were gradually, falsely led to believe that their mission had become one of dramatic force, and not the peace preached by Mohmed, the Prophet of Allah. Given the massive political tensions of the times, caused by conflicts over the extent of personal liberties, who would stand to gain from such counter-intelligence manipulations?"
"As a growing number of americans began to feel that there was a darker side of their rulers' international leanings, those whose power and wealth lay in perpetuating that dark side began to fear exposure. Thus, as some claimed happened with the invasion of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, it also became apparent that those who stood most to gain from an 'unexpected, devastating, and cowardly' attack were leaders of military powers and corporate regimes. While no evidence regarding whether government agents had prior knowledge of or other involvement with the impending attacks ever came to light, there were some who theorized that the subsequent spate of anti-terror abrogations of civil liberties were the goal of these unseen high-level elements. If historians can ever find evidence of whether these scenarios might be true, we would have to wonder at the kind of people would play games with the lives of thousands to protect their financial or nationalistic interests. It is almost certain that they were acting out of honestly-held convictions. Even thousands of years of recorded history have shown us few Monsters -- most human violence has in fact been committed by highly principled men and women who felt sure that what they were doing was best for their fellow beings."
Let us now all have a week of careful meditation on the pain and suffering endured during the Greatest Dark Age of history, before all humans learned to wish only the Peace of God upon each other. Once we have all passed a week thinking upon these matters, our class will resume for a discussion of how similar misunderstandings and applications of the now-debunked "greater good" system of pseudoethics were also being perpetrated, to various degrees of horror, by governments and organizations outside the former United States of America.
lobbyists with $$$$ get direct time with the candidates or high-ranking staffmembers, both of which yield much greater influence than the intern who merely runs an "issues tally" of letters received in between working on his/her gag reflex.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcfv gbhnjmk,l.;/ why did you map both 'f' and 'g' onto 't'? also, the apostrophe appears completely unmapped. why go to all the trouble of inputting a patterned sequence if you violate the pattern, reducing its clarity?
How many innocent civilians did the USA nuke in Hiroshima and Nagasaki now again.. ?
According to the Encyclopedia of Genocide [ABC-Clio, 1999, ISBN 0874369282],
"The number of persons in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing is thought to have been approximately 400,000, of which some 40,000 were military personnel. The bomb destroyed most of the city, and resulted in the immediate deaths of some 90,000 - 100,000 persons. Deaths and injuries were caused by blast, heat, fire and radiation. By the end of 1945, approximately 140,000 people are thought to have died as a result of the Hiroshima bombing."
"It [the Nagasaki bomb] destroyed much of the city and killed some 35,000 - 40,000 people immediately. By the end of 1945, approximately 70,000 persons died as a result of the bombing."
Which brings Your US Government Nuclear Murder Grand Total to almost a quarter of a million snuffed human lives.
Also of note:
"The decision to drop nuclear weapons on Japan was made by US President Harry Truman and his close advisors, despite their knowledge that Japan was attempting to negotiate terms of surrender. On learning of the bomb's 'success,' Truman commented, 'This is the greatest thing in history.'
...Since international humanitarian law was already in place at the end of World War II... it can be concluded that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illegal acts of war. They violated international humanitarian law by attacking civilian populations..."
hey, smeg-eating shithead, if you had a grasp of the goddamn english language instead of that urdu shit they teach you in pakistan, you would have noticed that the guy specifically said:
Once a game breaks into the mainstream, thousands of imitations will appear, merely tweaking a theme or giving a boost to graphics performance.
the games he's listing are examples of the ones that BROKE INTO THE MAINSTREAM, not the original genre-starter.
what's funny is that i started writing this post as soon as i'd read the original, because i knew there'd be a whole fucking platoon of nimrods wanting to prop up their shrinking-violet personalities by saying, "well, actually.... GameXYZ came out years before any of the games you mention and is the first TRUE XYZ game."
i salute your post and the objective you are helping to accomplish. trolling has become the most effective online method for putting a mirror up to the face of humanity and forcing it to see how morally ugly we can be. in two hundred years, slash/blog/usenet/e-diary archives will have become the sacred parables read by children learning the history of their species.
thanks for being here on the front lines of discourse.
"sincerity is the new irony" -the Brunching Shuttlecocks
do the hokey pokey and maybe get yourself killed is what it's all about.
the interesting thing about pacifism is that it's not an angle which really allows for much wiggle room. Either you do not engage in violence at any time for any reason, or you engage in violence, however limited, and sacrifice the moral ground to condemn the violence of others, who possess their own set of grievances and justifications.
what those who seek to learn about pacifism must understand is that it is a moral, spiritual, humane philosophy. as such, it asks its suscribers to subject to a seemingly impractical code. for if pacifists cannot find an effective nonviolent means of defense, they will tend to die out, leaving the world populated only by non-pacifists. this is where it is necessary to understand that pacifism is not a Religion or a God -- there are no promises of divine intervention to save you and not necessarily any eternal happiness awaiting should you die [although a significant portion of Western Pacifism derives from certain Christian sects who eschew the slash-and-burn evangelism practiced by the mainstream catholic and protestant denominations]. the hope of a pacifist is not necessarily to be rewarded in this life or the next, but rather to stand against the immorality of violence against fellow human beings. [one place to start would be http://www.catholicworker.org/ ]
the other thing many people don't understand about pacifism is that it does not preclude solid self-defense. it only takes a shift of thinking away from the mainstream assumption of "we need to have the resources to kill anyone who tries to harm us" to "how can we best avoid violent conflict and what nonviolent defenses can we rely upon if we are attacked".
yes, after 1600 years, Christianity has finally mellowed out from a megalomaniacal system of power to a big-hairdo consumerism.
the only difference is that you guys have a several-centuries head start on Islam. think of this as cosmic payback for the sins of your church fathers, and rest assured that three hundred years from now, when muslims rule the planet, they will be as liberatarian and materialistic as today's USA!
Um, you might want to pick up your Bible again and take a look at the maps in the back. The State of Israel today is exactly where it was in Old Testament times. Nothing arbitrary about it.
My parents met in Bible College, and pastored within the United Pentecostal Church for many years, so I assure you I have a reasonably firm knowledge of Scripture.
The point I am making is that the map of "Old Testament Times" in a Bible is not a judicious precedent for setting modern policy. In 1948 the modern state of Israel was created with force and the threat of military force by the major post-WWII powers [in this case, primarily England], and the continuing existence of the state of Israel is a result of the continued application of violence and the threat of violence by the [US-supported] Israeli military.
The brand of "ancient founding charter" mentality you are supporting is exactly the kind of rhetoric which both sides use to stir their populations to inhumane violence. Every culture, worldwide, has sacred writings which establish history and geographic origins. If the story of the covenant between YHWH and Abraham is to be used as a valid basis for establishing a nation in an area where people have been living for generations, then the United States of America must be prepared also to recognize any religious, historical, or tribal claims of its native peoples, and must immediately cede all previously claimed territories back to a tribal council, displacing without remedy every person currently living on the land in question. Undoubtedly, this land would include huge swaths of the continent, not just the relatively small, few reservations the government allows to exist. Where will the millions of displaced United States Citizens go? How will they rebuild their lives?
According to your view it is okay to eject them from the land their families have inhabited for the last two centuries, because somebody else has an older, Grandfather Clause Charter. Do you understand that if this were to occur, there would immediately be rioting, lynching, and mass murder between the two groups? Do you understand that this Race War is the only possible result of the No Compromise / No Regard For Recent History policy you propose?
I don't hold any special ill will towards the state of Israel. As I said previously, who can blame them for defending the only country in which they have an ethnic majority of the citizenry [leaving aside the volatile citizenship status of the Palestinian inhabitants]? And who can blame the Palestinians for bitterness against the forcibly-established "teacher's pet" of the Middle East?
The second point I would make is that you have greatly oversimplified your Biblical History. "The State of Israel" to which you allude is just like every other nation throughout history. Specifically, its borders, citizens, and political identities were in a state of constant flux during the entire OT period. There were not enough members of the original House of Abraham to fill, use, or even claim the land we now know of as "Israel". Abraham was just one small part of a large-scale expansion of civilization emerging from the area around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. By all Biblical indications, YHWH did indeed promise Abraham some land in the region where Israel currently exists, but the extent of that land -- its size and its borders, grew and receded with the tides of history and power.
The OT is a working chronology of both the spiritual covenant between the Hebrews and their God, and the geopolitical realities of living on the coast of the incredibly culturally diverse sea which would play an essential part in the development of the entire Western World [and now, with 6 billion of us on the planet, the entire globe]. During the 4 books of Kings and Chronicles alone, the borders, the very existence of Israel were highly mutable. Do you think that the Ammonites, Midianites, Moabites, Hittites, Hamites, Assyrians, and the hundreds of other groups, didn't also have traditions of "This land is my land, that land is your land"? YHWH did not, as far as my Bible studies go, give Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, David, Jehochiam, Hezekiah, Jereboam, and other Hebrew leaders a GPS hook-up so that they could know exactly where Israel stopped and the neighboring countries' lands began. Therefore, the locations of those borders were determined the same way nearly all borders are determined: might makes right. Who had the might, and thus the right, to define those borders changed frequently due to pressures both internal and external to the developing Hebrew civilization.
Therefore, while working from the idea that "The State of Israel" is, and has always been a concrete, well-defined concept may be an expedient justification for uncompromising preservation of its current properties, but it is is both historically and politically unwarranted to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Education institutions, on the other hand, have previously existing restrictions on handling and protecting student records as defined by FERPA. As the article states, MIT expresses willingness to comply with properly issued subpoenas. Essentially, these institutions are asking the courts to establish which law has primacy, FERPA or DMCA, because the current situation potentially leaves them open to lawsuits brought by students over violation of privacy as outlined in FERPA if they comply with the DMCA-based information requests.
__
I am a researcher by profession. The cases cited in the article are examples of poor search technique, not poor indexing algorithms. Anyone who puts in scattershot single terms with no site limitations deserves the incredibly skewed and uninformative results they get. Putting in a single word [especially common words like "apple"] to a search engine hasn't been a good technique since about 1996.
You want information on, say, the nutritional value of apples? Go to google and try a well-formed search query such as:
nutrition apples site:.org
[there are many other ways you could form this and almost any query]
Coming from MSN, who naturally want you to use their native search function, this article's assertions are doubly suspect.
lol, i don't really expect you to believe me when i say that i ain't chris vrenna. but if you look at my comment history, you'll see that it was only after 9/11 that i drifted over to the dark side of comments. before that i always tried to Say Something Meaningful. the crapflood of online discussion that ballooned out of those events really turned me off. i used to quietly post occasional thoughts on k5, and for a while i was a plastic.com poli/soc junkie, but for now i just don't see much value in discussion. people's feelings change because circumstances force them to, and at this point in my life i need my human interaction to be more than entertainment. but whoever chris vrenna was, if he sounds that convincingly like me he must be a Great Soul, indeed.
lots of love. try not to squander it, because soon you'll be dead.
The Truth hurts, doesn't it.
Please don't dignify Trent Reznor by referring to him as "who". He is one of the sorriest excuses for an "artist" produced by the mid-90s generation. He's like hair-satan-metal of the 80s, he pumps out wave after wave of same-sounding screaming angry crap, which sells like hotcakes to 13-year-old upper middle class kids who are mad 'cause mum and dad won't let them smoke dope in their bedroom -- they actually make them go OUTSIDE to get high! Fucking Oppressive Bastards!! "I can't wait until they give me my measley $25 weekly allowance so I can go buy another album with music that echoes the dark gothic void of my black soul."
Oh wait, this is slashdot, not kuro5hin. I just pissed off every regular poster here.... Hey boys, your Uncle Jack will probably buy you both weed and NIN if you let him put on the Santa suit and cornhole you like last christmas.
in a sense, "they" have been doing exactly that for thousands of years, to only temporary benefit. in recent history, the severely limited powers of the US federal government were designed by political geniuses who wished people, cities, states, i.e. "local" societies, to preserve near-total self-determination as long as they universally honored the basic political/moral freedoms enumerated in the first 8 amendments.
now that the federales operate without limit, americans, too, are beginning to face the question, "where can i live a reasonable life according to my principles without tyranny?"
as waco amply demonstrated, if their way of life was viewed as a threat to the way of life that sustains the government, they indeed would need to buy an island somewhere outside of governmental influence [unlike colonialists throughout time who staked claims solely through military superiority, there is no longer any usable land that doesn't necessitate "purchase" from some person or group].
historically speaking, however, there is no evidence that the protection of a new frontier lasts more than a few, short generations.
in the future, anyone wishing to create and preserve what they believe to be a morally, technologically, or medically pristine community will need to either have a few billion dollars with which to "buy an island somewhere" [not to mention an elite force of diplomat-lobbyists skilled in international law to protect the commune's right to exist, or at least to convince other governments to provide that protection], or they will have to somehow convince their federal establishments to cede regulatory powers back to local establishments. of course, such an arrangement has its own set of problems, the most important of which being that governments never voluntarily cede to civilians powers they have taken for themselves.
buti nga
American style would call for "period." Morons! and not "period". Morons! Interesting that you punctuated in the Brit style that you don't seem to care for.
i am an american and was "educated" in american schools. i always fought with my teachers about placement of end punctuation vis-a-vis the quotation marks. my sophomore year in high school i finally decided that i was going to place the period/exclamation/question outside the quotes, and if they wanted to deduct points i really didn't care. this was bad for my grades but good for my character, because i learned that being deliberately wrong can be satisfying.
of course, these days, postpostpostmodern formlessness has eaten my writing habits -- i mean, i can't remember when the last time was that i wrote anything that wasn't email or requests for video section reposts on a.b.m.e.m.
writing is dead, long live the written word!
Your "jobless self" might reconsider living a lush lifestyle that drives you to spend all your money on computer hardware and electronic toys and cable television and then leave yourself unable to afford net access for your various gadgets.
The concept of Opprtunity Cost is universal to all decisions, all systems. It sounds like you may have simply misjudged the difference between your unlimited options and your limited resources.
yes, it's probably good to make people more conservation-minded of their usage, so that they don't sit around all day hogging bandwidth doing useless stuff unless they are over 25 years old and have real jobs that pay enough to feed the net-addiction.
of course, you have just shredded the business model of streaming media content providers and advert-based blogs.
CongGRATulAYtions! Ama-a-azing Skill!
who cares how easily aircraft can be redesigned with safer fuel -- the government, under threat of arrest, confiscation, and imprisonment, is taking your tax dollars and giving them to the airline companies. as the multibillion-dollar Star Wars project has confirmed, the government has no qualms about spending the money it takes from you without your permission.
]]Most likely line numbers, because he cut and pasted from another site (not that there is anything wrong with that :P)
those numbers are the verse numbers as marked in most editions of the christian bible; as cuttededed and pasteded from bible.com
all this damn computer work has given me a moderate RSI, so I try not to type big paragraphs of text that can be pasted from elsewhere. why duplicate the typing effort somebody else has already done? think of it as "open-source" typing. hehe, okay that was silly but oh well...
Aye, Verily do I also say unto thee, it will be easier for Dancing Boy Bands to get respect on the College Radio circuit than for Americans to give up their divertainments in order to [re]gain peace and freedom.
Not willing to fight for your rights? Then this is what you get. Even if you are willing to(in the US, anyway), not enough of your fellow non-voters are, so give up.
I used to only make that comment in an ironic fashion [i.e., the lame attempt to shock/offend others/yourself out of their/your inaction], but now I can say it with total sincerity. I think there's already too much momentum in the degenerate parts of "the system" to be stopped and rebuffed by the socially brilliant, powerful parts of "the system".
ps postmodernity will be the death of postmodern humanity
pps log rolls over we'll all be dead
ppps Adventure Frightens Me. Buy more stuff to weigh me down.
pppps The first rule of emotional self-cannabilization is, you always do talk about self-cannabilization
I wholeheartedly concur. Nowadays, people have begun to treat Muslims as the bogeymen to be dragged up whenever something is needed to be justified or explained as "evil". There are many different psychological theories as to why whitewashed america is turning more and more to the us-vs-them mentality. Some claim this growing tendency as a byproduct of the evolutionary pressure to quickly categorize things into categories such as "dangerous/painful".
But personally, I blame it on Islamic Militants.
Let us now all have a week of careful meditation on the pain and suffering endured during the Greatest Dark Age of history, before all humans learned to wish only the Peace of God upon each other. Once we have all passed a week thinking upon these matters, our class will resume for a discussion of how similar misunderstandings and applications of the now-debunked "greater good" system of pseudoethics were also being perpetrated, to various degrees of horror, by governments and organizations outside the former United States of America.
"Face Time"
lobbyists with $$$$ get direct time with the candidates or high-ranking staffmembers, both of which yield much greater influence than the intern who merely runs an "issues tally" of letters received in between working on his/her gag reflex.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcfv gbhnjmk,l.;/
why did you map both 'f' and 'g' onto 't'? also, the apostrophe appears completely unmapped. why go to all the trouble of inputting a patterned sequence if you violate the pattern, reducing its clarity?
ahh....
It runs considerably faster than W2K on this laptop, faster than anything including Linux. It has never crashed, nor even looked like crashing.
This is like saying, in 1919, that Stalin has never ordered, nor even looked like ordering, the deaths of millions. "Just you wait, 'enry 'iggins!"
Funniest [un]intentionally ironic shill I've read all day!!
According to the Encyclopedia of Genocide [ABC-Clio, 1999, ISBN 0874369282],
Which brings Your US Government Nuclear Murder Grand Total to almost a quarter of a million snuffed human lives.
Also of note:
the games he's listing are examples of the ones that BROKE INTO THE MAINSTREAM, not the original genre-starter.
what's funny is that i started writing this post as soon as i'd read the original, because i knew there'd be a whole fucking platoon of nimrods wanting to prop up their shrinking-violet personalities by saying, "well, actually.... GameXYZ came out years before any of the games you mention and is the first TRUE XYZ game."
pls die tks
lytefoot, i just wanted to thank you for your post.
i salute your post and the objective you are helping to accomplish. trolling has become the most effective online method for putting a mirror up to the face of humanity and forcing it to see how morally ugly we can be. in two hundred years, slash/blog/usenet/e-diary archives will have become the sacred parables read by children learning the history of their species.
thanks for being here on the front lines of discourse.
"sincerity is the new irony" -the Brunching Shuttlecocks
do the hokey pokey and maybe get yourself killed is what it's all about.
the interesting thing about pacifism is that it's not an angle which really allows for much wiggle room. Either you do not engage in violence at any time for any reason, or you engage in violence, however limited, and sacrifice the moral ground to condemn the violence of others, who possess their own set of grievances and justifications.
what those who seek to learn about pacifism must understand is that it is a moral, spiritual, humane philosophy. as such, it asks its suscribers to subject to a seemingly impractical code. for if pacifists cannot find an effective nonviolent means of defense, they will tend to die out, leaving the world populated only by non-pacifists. this is where it is necessary to understand that pacifism is not a Religion or a God -- there are no promises of divine intervention to save you and not necessarily any eternal happiness awaiting should you die [although a significant portion of Western Pacifism derives from certain Christian sects who eschew the slash-and-burn evangelism practiced by the mainstream catholic and protestant denominations]. the hope of a pacifist is not necessarily to be rewarded in this life or the next, but rather to stand against the immorality of violence against fellow human beings.
[one place to start would be http://www.catholicworker.org/ ]
the other thing many people don't understand about pacifism is that it does not preclude solid self-defense. it only takes a shift of thinking away from the mainstream assumption of "we need to have the resources to kill anyone who tries to harm us" to "how can we best avoid violent conflict and what nonviolent defenses can we rely upon if we are attacked".
yes, after 1600 years, Christianity has finally mellowed out from a megalomaniacal system of power to a big-hairdo consumerism.
the only difference is that you guys have a several-centuries head start on Islam. think of this as cosmic payback for the sins of your church fathers, and rest assured that three hundred years from now, when muslims rule the planet, they will be as liberatarian and materialistic as today's USA!
The point I am making is that the map of "Old Testament Times" in a Bible is not a judicious precedent for setting modern policy. In 1948 the modern state of Israel was created with force and the threat of military force by the major post-WWII powers [in this case, primarily England], and the continuing existence of the state of Israel is a result of the continued application of violence and the threat of violence by the [US-supported] Israeli military.
The brand of "ancient founding charter" mentality you are supporting is exactly the kind of rhetoric which both sides use to stir their populations to inhumane violence. Every culture, worldwide, has sacred writings which establish history and geographic origins. If the story of the covenant between YHWH and Abraham is to be used as a valid basis for establishing a nation in an area where people have been living for generations, then the United States of America must be prepared also to recognize any religious, historical, or tribal claims of its native peoples, and must immediately cede all previously claimed territories back to a tribal council, displacing without remedy every person currently living on the land in question. Undoubtedly, this land would include huge swaths of the continent, not just the relatively small, few reservations the government allows to exist. Where will the millions of displaced United States Citizens go? How will they rebuild their lives?
According to your view it is okay to eject them from the land their families have inhabited for the last two centuries, because somebody else has an older, Grandfather Clause Charter. Do you understand that if this were to occur, there would immediately be rioting, lynching, and mass murder between the two groups? Do you understand that this Race War is the only possible result of the No Compromise / No Regard For Recent History policy you propose?
I don't hold any special ill will towards the state of Israel. As I said previously, who can blame them for defending the only country in which they have an ethnic majority of the citizenry [leaving aside the volatile citizenship status of the Palestinian inhabitants]? And who can blame the Palestinians for bitterness against the forcibly-established "teacher's pet" of the Middle East?
The second point I would make is that you have greatly oversimplified your Biblical History. "The State of Israel" to which you allude is just like every other nation throughout history. Specifically, its borders, citizens, and political identities were in a state of constant flux during the entire OT period. There were not enough members of the original House of Abraham to fill, use, or even claim the land we now know of as "Israel". Abraham was just one small part of a large-scale expansion of civilization emerging from the area around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. By all Biblical indications, YHWH did indeed promise Abraham some land in the region where Israel currently exists, but the extent of that land -- its size and its borders, grew and receded with the tides of history and power.
The OT is a working chronology of both the spiritual covenant between the Hebrews and their God, and the geopolitical realities of living on the coast of the incredibly culturally diverse sea which would play an essential part in the development of the entire Western World [and now, with 6 billion of us on the planet, the entire globe]. During the 4 books of Kings and Chronicles alone, the borders, the very existence of Israel were highly mutable. Do you think that the Ammonites, Midianites, Moabites, Hittites, Hamites, Assyrians, and the hundreds of other groups, didn't also have traditions of "This land is my land, that land is your land"? YHWH did not, as far as my Bible studies go, give Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, David, Jehochiam, Hezekiah, Jereboam, and other Hebrew leaders a GPS hook-up so that they could know exactly where Israel stopped and the neighboring countries' lands began. Therefore, the locations of those borders were determined the same way nearly all borders are determined: might makes right. Who had the might, and thus the right, to define those borders changed frequently due to pressures both internal and external to the developing Hebrew civilization.
Therefore, while working from the idea that "The State of Israel" is, and has always been a concrete, well-defined concept may be an expedient justification for uncompromising preservation of its current properties, but it is is both historically and politically unwarranted to do so.