I've read that the phrase is difficult to translate. Some have speculated that 'camel' might be 'rope' - similar words in aramaic, so the error could have been introduced when transcribing the sermon into greek. It makes a lot more sense if it was rope.
If I ever get filthy stinking rich, I'm going to construct the world's largest needle just so I can drive a camel through it.
It's a big empty void aside from a very very interesting rocks. We live on one of the larger rocks. Some of the other large rocks are potentially habitable, though a lot more difficult than our current one. The smaller rocks are of scientific interest.
There may even be other easily-habitable rocks, they are just a lot further away and currently inaccessible.
I've read the Humanae Vitae. Recinding it would be problematic, because it's main justification* is purely theological. The church cannot simply declare it made a mistake on theology - even though it isn't issued using the rarely-invoked papal infallability, it's still supposed to be guided by God and so really shouldn't be wrong on such a matter. The Pope could do it, of course - but it would cause some serious chaos in church politics, and may even lead to some of the more conservative individual churches rejecting central authority and breaking off.
* There are some secular reasons further down towards the end, but they are only offered in support of the primary justification. Some are quite amusing. It argues that contraception destroys the rights of women, because it will cause men to see them as nothing but sex objects.
The strict interpretation approach has the same problem as programming language: Exploitable bugs. It becomes very easy for someone to subvert the intent of the law by finding some little technicality that the writers didn't think of.
Most of them would do nothing. People care about their rights, but few care enough to go to jail for them. There are a lot of blowhards who talk big about standing up to the government, but for most that's as far as it goes.
Every now and then though, you do get a Manning or a Snowden who is willing to sacrifice themselves and risk spending the rest of their life in jail in order to take a stand and expose the abuses. It's very rare, which it why it's such news when that does happen.
It happens all the time, at all levels. Another common example is carefully crafting laws to work around judicial decisions.
Say, the supreme court rules that women have a right to first-trimester abortion as an extension of the right to privacy in medical and personal matters. There's not enough political agreement throughout the country to get a constitutional amendment passed changing this, which would be the appropriate solution for those who disagree with the ruling. So what's the solution? Keep abortion legal. But mandate background checks on all women, require clinics be subject to ridiculous health regulations just to dispense a pill, require they all have a doctor granted admitting privlidge at a local hospital while knowing full well that many hospitals will refuse to grant it to anyone who performs elective abortion, require a two-day waiting period, and require women be informed against all medical knowledge that the procedure will increase their risk of cancer. The supreme court is thus subverted: Abortion is legal, but effectively unavailable to many.
There's a similar approach with the Mount Soledad Cross - every time a court rules it illegal, the government quickly shifts ownership to another jurisdiction and thus takes it out of the authority of that court, or renders the decision inapplicable. Nearly thirty years that legal battle has been going on now, and late last year (2014) congress snuck a clause in an appropriations bill authorising the sale to a private party in order to pull the same trick again.
Or the issue with sex offender exclusions. Courts have ruled that cities cannot pass laws prohibiting released sex offenders from residency, because that would be effectively an extra punishment on top of that which the court has authorised as a proper part of the justice system, plus it's legally prohibited to retroactively increase the severity of a sentence. So instead they pass exclusion zones, saying that sex offenders may not live within so many yards of any school. Or shopping mall. Or daycare center. Or school bus stop. Or ice rink. Or cinema. Or playground Anywhere children might be encountered. With enough exclusions, entire cities are rendered off-limits. Or they can impose reporting requirements that are intentionally impossible to comply with, like requiring the offender to go around to every neighbour within a certain radius and announce their address and sex offender status - thus ensuring they are subject to vigilantee attacks and destruction of property, with the ultimate intention of making life so unbearable they are forced to leave the city. Once again the court is subverte by achieving indirectly what cannot be done openly.
The parties hold each other together. If a new liberal-leaning party did emerge it would steal votes from the democrats, handing the country on a plate to the republicans. If a new conservative-leaning party emerged the same would happen, with roles reversed. Both sides know this, and voters are smart enough to realise it is better to vote for the party you disagree with least than to let the real enemy take power. It's a very stable political system, allowing the balence of power to shift around a little but preventing any real reform from taking hold.
I know of them! I've been annoyed reading of them before. It's a conservative organisation that is defined as the exact opposite of the environmental movement. It is their belief that natural resources were created by God, for Man - and thus it is not only mankind's right to exploit them, but a divine duty to do so. They also reject the possibility of climate change on the grounds that God wouldn't create a world so fragile that humans could break it*, and regard the free market as the solution to pretty much everything. Their approach is that no-one would willingly damage land they personally own, so if all land is in private hands then it will be safe from environmental destruction.
Their main rhetorical device is to frame things as helping the poor. For example, on climate change, they'll point out that emisions reductions have a considerable economic cost, especially in developing countries - cheap energy is the great driver of economic growth and advancement. Therefore emissions reductions efforts frustrate the growth that would otherwise lift people and whole countries out of poverty. Throw in a picture of some starving children in Africa, and it turns into a story about how stupid liberals are killing children by denying them access to the wealth of oil and industrial agriculture. It's effective because it's arguably true to some extent - and it would be a perfectly valid argument, if they weren't ruling out any possibility of climate change causing far worse problems on grounds, not of scientific reasoning, but of theology: God wouldn't let that happen.
*According to their own website: "As the product of infinitely wise design, omnipotent creation, and faithful sustaining (Genesis 1:1–31; 8:21–22), Earth is robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting. Although Earth and its subsystems, including the climate system, are susceptible to some damage by ignorant or malicious human action, God’s wise design and faithful sustaining make these natural systems more likely—as confirmed by widespread scientific observation—to respond in ways that suppress and correct that damage than magnify it catastrophically."
Economic, for one. If you've got some really cheap manufacturing capacity to sell to the world, nuke a major Chinese industrial city. Lots of corporations start a desperate hunt for new factories, and you've got some ready to go.
You could also use it to spark a nuclear war, if you're really crazy. Nuke, say, Moscow. Russia would immediately go to their cold-war-era second-strike protocol, and nuke America right back - and America in turn fires off the ICBMs the moment they see incoming on the radar. China joins in to lend support to Russia, Europe joins in against China. Billions dead, world economy in ruins. And there's NK, sitting happy, because no-one thought they were worth the cost of a bomb. With the south's allies out of commission, that leaves NK free to launch an invasion.
There's another reason they can win against the US: The US is obliged to avoid civilian casualties. This means they are fighting with one hand tied behind their back.
ISIS are sensible enough to stop their campaigns at the border of Iran, and Turkey. Taking over some half-collapsed government in Syria and the inept appointed authority of Iraq is hard enough - they aren't dumb enough to start a war they can't win.
Why would they fire a nuke? Better to have plausible deniability: Stick it in a shiping container, address to your target city. Trigger on timer/GPS/cellphone. That way NK can blame the Taliban, the Taliban can blame IS, IS can blame Iran, Iran can blame NK and everyone can blame Russia - and the rest of the world has no idea who they are supposed to invade in response.
Companies are headed by people. The more power is vested in specific individuals, the more their personalities manifest in the behavior of the company.
This isn't always a good thing, though. See Hobby Lobby, the company that successfully won an exemption from the healthcare reform mandate on the grounds that requiring them to cover contraception would infringe on the religious rights of the owners.
The breach revealed too much juicy stuff to be a intentional - but I wouldn't put it past Sony to play up the Interview connection. Remember the initial breach and associated bragging announcement by GoP made no mention of the Interview at all.
Power of Super Money, perviously known for using hyper-aggressive business stratagies often anticompetative and bordering on ilegal, personal interest in developing energy technology, capable of some innovation on his own but more commonly hires more specialised underlings... is this Gates or Luthor?
He has the power of Super Money. Plenty of superhero setting characters have that power, usually in conjunction with a high skill level in another field.
Plus the business ability to make it work financially. Plenty of people have the ability to innovate technologically but no skill at business management - they can try and fail, or they can just go work for an established company and give up the possibility of vast wealth in exchange for a near-guarantee of a moderate income.
Not entirely surprising. The courts are part of the government. The intention is to separate the powers of government into three branches so that each can serve as a check of the others. It works a lot of the time, but not always - even judges are somewhat dependent upon political favor to advance their careers. In practice it often results in a lot of underhanded political games - remember the time that pizza was legally declared a fruit, so that schools could more easily comply with nutritional standards? Or the use of overlapping exclusion zones to banish sex offenders from entire cities? Or pretty much anything related to abortion?
x86/64, but with a ton of stuff crammed into the ACPI interface, some of which is actually there for power management, none of which is properly documented because every manufacturer likes to put their hotkeys and screen close sensor on a different ACPI event.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read that the phrase is difficult to translate. Some have speculated that 'camel' might be 'rope' - similar words in aramaic, so the error could have been introduced when transcribing the sermon into greek. It makes a lot more sense if it was rope.
If I ever get filthy stinking rich, I'm going to construct the world's largest needle just so I can drive a camel through it.
Pixels. The screenplay was one of the leaked documents. It actually looked somewhat amusing, skimming through.
Oh, well. To the torrents!
It's a big empty void aside from a very very interesting rocks. We live on one of the larger rocks. Some of the other large rocks are potentially habitable, though a lot more difficult than our current one. The smaller rocks are of scientific interest.
There may even be other easily-habitable rocks, they are just a lot further away and currently inaccessible.
What was that thing he said about camels and needles?
I've read the Humanae Vitae. Recinding it would be problematic, because it's main justification* is purely theological. The church cannot simply declare it made a mistake on theology - even though it isn't issued using the rarely-invoked papal infallability, it's still supposed to be guided by God and so really shouldn't be wrong on such a matter. The Pope could do it, of course - but it would cause some serious chaos in church politics, and may even lead to some of the more conservative individual churches rejecting central authority and breaking off.
* There are some secular reasons further down towards the end, but they are only offered in support of the primary justification. Some are quite amusing. It argues that contraception destroys the rights of women, because it will cause men to see them as nothing but sex objects.
The strict interpretation approach has the same problem as programming language: Exploitable bugs. It becomes very easy for someone to subvert the intent of the law by finding some little technicality that the writers didn't think of.
Most of them would do nothing. People care about their rights, but few care enough to go to jail for them. There are a lot of blowhards who talk big about standing up to the government, but for most that's as far as it goes.
Every now and then though, you do get a Manning or a Snowden who is willing to sacrifice themselves and risk spending the rest of their life in jail in order to take a stand and expose the abuses. It's very rare, which it why it's such news when that does happen.
It happens all the time, at all levels. Another common example is carefully crafting laws to work around judicial decisions.
Say, the supreme court rules that women have a right to first-trimester abortion as an extension of the right to privacy in medical and personal matters. There's not enough political agreement throughout the country to get a constitutional amendment passed changing this, which would be the appropriate solution for those who disagree with the ruling. So what's the solution? Keep abortion legal. But mandate background checks on all women, require clinics be subject to ridiculous health regulations just to dispense a pill, require they all have a doctor granted admitting privlidge at a local hospital while knowing full well that many hospitals will refuse to grant it to anyone who performs elective abortion, require a two-day waiting period, and require women be informed against all medical knowledge that the procedure will increase their risk of cancer. The supreme court is thus subverted: Abortion is legal, but effectively unavailable to many.
There's a similar approach with the Mount Soledad Cross - every time a court rules it illegal, the government quickly shifts ownership to another jurisdiction and thus takes it out of the authority of that court, or renders the decision inapplicable. Nearly thirty years that legal battle has been going on now, and late last year (2014) congress snuck a clause in an appropriations bill authorising the sale to a private party in order to pull the same trick again.
Or the issue with sex offender exclusions. Courts have ruled that cities cannot pass laws prohibiting released sex offenders from residency, because that would be effectively an extra punishment on top of that which the court has authorised as a proper part of the justice system, plus it's legally prohibited to retroactively increase the severity of a sentence. So instead they pass exclusion zones, saying that sex offenders may not live within so many yards of any school. Or shopping mall. Or daycare center. Or school bus stop. Or ice rink. Or cinema. Or playground Anywhere children might be encountered. With enough exclusions, entire cities are rendered off-limits. Or they can impose reporting requirements that are intentionally impossible to comply with, like requiring the offender to go around to every neighbour within a certain radius and announce their address and sex offender status - thus ensuring they are subject to vigilantee attacks and destruction of property, with the ultimate intention of making life so unbearable they are forced to leave the city. Once again the court is subverte by achieving indirectly what cannot be done openly.
The parties hold each other together. If a new liberal-leaning party did emerge it would steal votes from the democrats, handing the country on a plate to the republicans. If a new conservative-leaning party emerged the same would happen, with roles reversed. Both sides know this, and voters are smart enough to realise it is better to vote for the party you disagree with least than to let the real enemy take power. It's a very stable political system, allowing the balence of power to shift around a little but preventing any real reform from taking hold.
So what we need are people with gigantic piles of money who are not in their right mind.
I know of them! I've been annoyed reading of them before. It's a conservative organisation that is defined as the exact opposite of the environmental movement. It is their belief that natural resources were created by God, for Man - and thus it is not only mankind's right to exploit them, but a divine duty to do so. They also reject the possibility of climate change on the grounds that God wouldn't create a world so fragile that humans could break it*, and regard the free market as the solution to pretty much everything. Their approach is that no-one would willingly damage land they personally own, so if all land is in private hands then it will be safe from environmental destruction.
Their main rhetorical device is to frame things as helping the poor. For example, on climate change, they'll point out that emisions reductions have a considerable economic cost, especially in developing countries - cheap energy is the great driver of economic growth and advancement. Therefore emissions reductions efforts frustrate the growth that would otherwise lift people and whole countries out of poverty. Throw in a picture of some starving children in Africa, and it turns into a story about how stupid liberals are killing children by denying them access to the wealth of oil and industrial agriculture. It's effective because it's arguably true to some extent - and it would be a perfectly valid argument, if they weren't ruling out any possibility of climate change causing far worse problems on grounds, not of scientific reasoning, but of theology: God wouldn't let that happen.
*According to their own website: "As the product of infinitely wise design, omnipotent creation, and faithful sustaining (Genesis 1:1–31; 8:21–22), Earth is robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting. Although Earth and its subsystems, including the climate system, are susceptible to some damage by ignorant or malicious human action, God’s wise design and faithful sustaining make these natural systems more likely—as confirmed by widespread scientific observation—to respond in ways that suppress and correct that damage than magnify it catastrophically."
I can see a few.
Economic, for one. If you've got some really cheap manufacturing capacity to sell to the world, nuke a major Chinese industrial city. Lots of corporations start a desperate hunt for new factories, and you've got some ready to go.
You could also use it to spark a nuclear war, if you're really crazy. Nuke, say, Moscow. Russia would immediately go to their cold-war-era second-strike protocol, and nuke America right back - and America in turn fires off the ICBMs the moment they see incoming on the radar. China joins in to lend support to Russia, Europe joins in against China. Billions dead, world economy in ruins. And there's NK, sitting happy, because no-one thought they were worth the cost of a bomb. With the south's allies out of commission, that leaves NK free to launch an invasion.
There's another reason they can win against the US: The US is obliged to avoid civilian casualties. This means they are fighting with one hand tied behind their back.
ISIS are sensible enough to stop their campaigns at the border of Iran, and Turkey. Taking over some half-collapsed government in Syria and the inept appointed authority of Iraq is hard enough - they aren't dumb enough to start a war they can't win.
No, but they've lost plenty of peaces. How'd that Iraq thing turn out? And have they stamped out the Taliban yet?
Why would they fire a nuke? Better to have plausible deniability: Stick it in a shiping container, address to your target city. Trigger on timer/GPS/cellphone. That way NK can blame the Taliban, the Taliban can blame IS, IS can blame Iran, Iran can blame NK and everyone can blame Russia - and the rest of the world has no idea who they are supposed to invade in response.
To the torrents!
Companies are headed by people. The more power is vested in specific individuals, the more their personalities manifest in the behavior of the company.
This isn't always a good thing, though. See Hobby Lobby, the company that successfully won an exemption from the healthcare reform mandate on the grounds that requiring them to cover contraception would infringe on the religious rights of the owners.
Bitcoin is precisely as secure as the computer on which the wallet is stored. No more, no less.
The breach revealed too much juicy stuff to be a intentional - but I wouldn't put it past Sony to play up the Interview connection. Remember the initial breach and associated bragging announcement by GoP made no mention of the Interview at all.
Power of Super Money, perviously known for using hyper-aggressive business stratagies often anticompetative and bordering on ilegal, personal interest in developing energy technology, capable of some innovation on his own but more commonly hires more specialised underlings... is this Gates or Luthor?
He has the power of Super Money. Plenty of superhero setting characters have that power, usually in conjunction with a high skill level in another field.
Plus the business ability to make it work financially. Plenty of people have the ability to innovate technologically but no skill at business management - they can try and fail, or they can just go work for an established company and give up the possibility of vast wealth in exchange for a near-guarantee of a moderate income.
Not entirely surprising. The courts are part of the government. The intention is to separate the powers of government into three branches so that each can serve as a check of the others. It works a lot of the time, but not always - even judges are somewhat dependent upon political favor to advance their careers. In practice it often results in a lot of underhanded political games - remember the time that pizza was legally declared a fruit, so that schools could more easily comply with nutritional standards? Or the use of overlapping exclusion zones to banish sex offenders from entire cities? Or pretty much anything related to abortion?
x86/64, but with a ton of stuff crammed into the ACPI interface, some of which is actually there for power management, none of which is properly documented because every manufacturer likes to put their hotkeys and screen close sensor on a different ACPI event.