Interesting. If George W Bush isn't actually a Christian, then his statement makes sense. If he is, however, and believes that Jesus/God is omniscient, then things get more complicated. Philosopher literally means something like "lover of wisdom/knowledge", but the standard connotation is someone who seeks knowledge. An omniscient being, by definition, does not seek knowledge. There would be no reason to. On the other hand, many of the ideas espoused by Jesus in the bible do constitute a philosophy. So, as the central figure of the philosophy, Jesus could sort of be seen as an honorary philosopher.
As soon as gays and lesbians can have children without scientific intervention, they can get married, until then, they can be lovers/friends/partners, but not married - that is reserved by definition for couples that can, under normal circumstances, conceive children for the survival of the human race. All religions have this built into their mantra some place or another.
So, only fertile couples can get married? What about couples who thought they were fertile and found out later that they weren't? Does that annul their marriage, or do they have to get divorced? Or is it just too late for them and they need to be stoned to death as adulterers?
"...your original claim that 'nefesh shaya' is what differentiates us from animals..."
I made no such claim. The term is not an attribute, it is a descriptor.
First, it seems to me that you did make such a claim when you replied to an AC near the start of this thread:
In spite of that, a lot of Christians - I hesitate to claim the majority - hate to be reminded that they are animals.
I decline your category offer.
We are nefesh chaya, the implications of which I won't get into here, as you won't be interested and evolution will inevitably sort you out anyway.
Then you went on to try to be snarky and insulting and holier-than-thou by saying that the AC was an animal, but that you personally were something better. Anyway, unless there's invisible extra text in there that I need magic diamond glasses to read, you're saying that you reject the AC's categorization of humans as animals and claim that humans are nefesh chaya instead. This makes no sense since humans and other animlas are both either nefesh chaya or posess nefesh chaya depending on exactly how you translate and interpret nefesh chaya: "living soul" or "animal" (from the Latin: Anima, meaning "breath" or "soul") or perhaps "organism". A "living soul" could be a descriptor saying what something is, but could also be an attribute that something posesses depending on point of view and exact translation. Either way, it's not something that differentiates humans and other animals.
As I later explicitly used English for in an elaborating argument, categorizing both humans and animals as "living souls" (or "living beings") is not synonymous with stating that humans are a subcategory of animals.
In the context we're using, humans are clearly a subcategory of "living souls". The set of "living souls" is the set of all animals. You believe that humans possess special properties that make them stand out from the set. So what. Many members of the set have special qualities that make them stand out from the set, they're still in the set. I mean, for crying out loud, as I pointed out earlier, the word "animal" comes from a latin word which literally means virtually the same thing as "living soul"/nefesh chaya.
Here is an early Google hit which brief review indicates I'm in agreement with.
Ok. So, to be clear, you're definitely either 100% pro-choice when it comes to abortion (including late term abortion) or you're a vegan, right? Because if you're in agreement with that article, you have to be one of those things since it's very clear that, until the moment of birth, a human is no different than any other animal. So, you should only object to abortions at any point before birth if you also completely object to killing animals for any reason, in which case you should be a Vegan to remain philosophically consistant.
Aside from that, what about all the animals that can reason, even if not better than the average human? There are animals that can reason better than a minority of humans (not to mention infant humans whose reasoning capacity is dwarfed by that of nearly all other mammals). Then there's speech, which is also posessed by a number of animals, either through sign languauge or outright ability to form audible words. Then there are those who posess some form of speech and also some reasoning capacity. So, is that the way it is? Humans, parrots and gorillas on a pedestal, raised up above the scum that are the rest of the kingdom animalia? Sure, the chimpanzees can't get into the club because they bite (and human children never, ever, ever do that), but what are you gonna do, you know?
P.S. I'm interested by your signature, which is an excerpt from the gospel of Mary Magdelene. It seems an odd contrast here with your rigid and orthodox view of humanities place among (or not among) the other animals.
Whoziwazzit now? Weight divided by height squared? What a sad, pathetic world we live in where this is considered in any way meaningful. It's meant as a statistical tool for populations, not individuals. Sure, a very high BMI will always be obese, and a very low BMI will be emaciated, but it's utterly meaningless through most of its range. I mean, there isn't even a different formula for men and women. Honestly, a simple visual inspection gives more meaningful information. It disgusts me that doctors use it.
Glucose, a carb, is a complex sugar, where fructose and sucrose are simple sugars. The inability to process food correctly give a pathway for the simple sugars to go undigested and wreak havoc on the gut flora.
Confused about that one. How is sucrose, which is a disacchiride composed of a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule, simpler than glucose?
It's fairly clear what you're saying. You're saying: "nyah, nyah, you claim to know the music of Jimmy Hendrix, but you don't really, because you can't actually hear Jimmy. Only I can hear Jimmy."
I've replied elsewhere, but I think this would be another good place to point this out. "Nefesh Shaya" appears in Genesis 1:20-21:
20: And God said: "Let the waters teem with crawling beings of living soul (Nefesh Chaya) and birds that fly over the earth across the expanse of the heavens."
21: And God created the great sea giants and every living soul (nefesh hachaya) which creeps that the waters teemed with their kinds; and all winged bird to its kind. And God saw that it was good
So, based on that, your original claim that "nefesh shaya" is what differentiates us from animals is nonsense since, by some translations, it literally means "animal". By other translations, it still means something that, at the very least, definitely applies to some sea life. So, is it that humans and lobsters are special and unique and apart from all other living things, or are you just making up your own interpretation?
We are nefesh chaya, the implications of which I won't get into here, as you won't be interested and evolution will inevitably sort you out anyway.
Sorry if you have a different interpretation here, but doesn't "nefesh chaya" translate as something like "living beast" (alternatively, "living soul", but passages that mention it specifically allude to the fact that all animals posess this quality)? Aren't all animals nefesh chaya (or possessing nefesh chaya, depending on your definition), making your distinction meaningless in this context?
I not only agree with you, but need to shake my head every time some apologist changes words like "beat" into "hit."
The terms seem fairly synonymous to me. Not to mention all we know is what we read in news articles. "Beat" probably wasn't used at all in the earliest news stories, because they probably weren't in English. If we want to know if this was a wanton, savage beating, or just a case of stunning and disorienting the drivers (still bad, but not the vicious, bloodthirsty event you're painting from your connotations of "beaten"), we'll have to hope that there's security camera footage that will be released. Otherwise, we just get what are virtually guaranteed to be poor summaries written by desk jockies whose primary job is rewriting copy to say more or less the same thing without actually being identifiable as plagiarism.
It isn't hate. There is an equally rational side that suggest that painful death as a consequence/punishment of violent crime DOES have a deterrent effect, even if minor.
If it's pure pragmatism driving the decision, then the question becomes whether the decreased crime from the deterrant effect of painful death as a punishment is greater or less than the _increased_ crime from the same. It's fairly obvious that there will be at least some people who will prevent themselves from committing a crime when the punishment for that crime is horrible. The thing is, there will be plenty of people who will still commit crimes anyway. Some of those criminials will inevitably be witnessed, or will have someone try to stop/capture them. With the prospect of painful death as a punishment, even a small child who happens to glimpse the face of a criminal becomes a deadly enemy who needs to be dealt with. So, inevitably, as punishments get harsher, the people who will committ crimes anyway will committ additional crimes in order to cover up the original crimes. So, once again, we have to ask whether the reduction in crime from one angle is greater or less than the increase in crime from another.
Another angle to consider is respect for law and order. Some people equate fear and respect. Some people respect others for their displays of dominance, strength and brutality. Many of the supposed fans of law and order seem to fetishize inhumanity towards ciminal undesirables. Just look at, for example, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa county. As far as I can tell, he's corrupt, not actually particularly effective, and costs his constituency far more than he's worth. But many people love him and keep voting him in because he's brutal to the people kept in his jail (which, as a jail, houses a fair number of people who have not yet been convicted). The problem is, there are plenty of people who, rather than being excited by such things, are disgusted by them instead. They lose respect for the "law" because it appears to be just case after case after case of might making right, with actual law and order being ignored by people who think that they _are_ the law. The damage to society that sort of thing can cause shouldn't be discounted.
Does money work when left alone? Pretty much every form of "money" ever, including gold and other precious metals, has worked by government or public consensus controlling its value. By that definition, capitalism only applies to barter.
Where in the 2nd amendment does it say that "mentally ill" people can't have guns, or anything close to that?
For a single sentence, the 2nd amendment spawns a lot of differing interpretations. Not even going into all the possibile interpretations about the "well regulated militia" part, it's important to note that it says that the right is of "the people" generally, and not individuals specifically. Anyway, interpretations may vary.
One important thing to note is that it has always been the case that the rights guaranteed by the constitution are not, in fact, guaranteed. Rather they're conditional. Convicts and children, for example, aren't given full rights to free speech or to free association, or to vote. So, the question is, does the absolute right to bear arms extend to incarcerated convicts? Newborn infants? The mentally incompetant? Without arguing one way or another, I'm going to say that denying rights, including rights to bear arms, due to status (age, mental competance, criminal status, gender, race, etc.) is not a new phenomenon and by no means applied exclusively to gun ownership.
What you either don't know or are just ignoring is that Assange is Australian. Australia is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. Australia might be able to get away with extraditing one of its own citizens to the US for a crime that's only supposed to be a crime when US citizens do it and that happened outside of US jurisdiction. If England does it, it creates a political problem both in England and in Australia. Sweden is a different story.
I'm curious how something so incredibly ignorant can be marked insightful: Joe Biden: "I would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers." Mitch McConnell: ""a high-tech terrorist.. he has done enormous damage to our country. I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law" Newt Gingrich: "Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant." Sarah Palin called for him to be pursued "with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders" There's a whole list of influential congresspersons and other people in government who have called for his assassination or prosecution. It's public knowledge that the Attorney general has worked on prosecuting him, and there's been a grand jury, although the actual outcome is secret. Basically, whether you think he should be prosecuted/assassinated or not, you would have to be living in a cave or willfully ignorant, or simply deceitful to claim that the US doesn't want him.
The Doctor is half human in the same way that the immortals from Highlander are alien convicts from the planet Zeist. In other words, why did the Highlander movies skip right from 1 to 3 with no part 2?
Collecting private and/or secret information on people without their knowledge and against their will. Seems to describe what they're doing and is simultaneously a suitable definition of "spying".
The collected information certainly can be abused — and potentially grossly so. But the same can be said about the very Internet-connectivity the TV boasts — and certainly about its use of the advanced Operating System (Linux) inside. All of those can be used unethically — easily — but are they? Until we know, how the data is used, we can not claim unethical behavior — though we'd be damn right to suspect it.
That's not right. I'm not sure if you're trying to employ misdirection or if you're honestly mistaken. The spying is unethical all by itself. Yes, the use to which the information is used can make it more or less unethical, but don't try to convince me that picking someone's lock, sneaking into their house, then cleaning the place isn't a crime. The police certainly won't see it that way. Even less so if you're only sneaking into their house to harmlessly check their underwear drawer to see what their favorite color is.
Which wire are you claiming is being tapped here? You purchased an "Internet-ready" TV-set and connected it to the Internet yourself... The device does not tap your (nor anyone else's) communications — it originates its own...
I'm working under the same theory that the authorities work under during many of the wiretapping prosecutions lately. As for what's being tapped, it's the communications between yourself, and other devices such as storage devices, that's being tapped.
And what LG collects may not even be considered personally identifiable — neither your name nor address are even known to the TV, much less reported by it, even if a dedicated investigator may be able to link the TV's serial number to you eventually.
Well, sure, absolutely... except for, you know, the _warranty registration_! Not to mention that it's not as if there aren't plenty of other ways to automatically collect that information.
Not unethical?! Are you joking? Secretly spying on people is not unethical? As for not illegal? That's a tougher question. It almost certainly violates the letter of various wiretapping laws. The trouble is, the actual application of those laws might apply to a regular individual spying on, for example, LG. Vice versa, however, the laws are likely to be ignored.
He almost certainly was real, and the majority of scholars think so. I was just pointing out that even for Socrates, there is some doubt as to his existance. A better example for the original poster might have been Augustus Caesar. He was actually alive during the time that Jesus was said to be alive, although he died about 16 years before the majority of the events attributed to him in the bible are said to have taken place. In any case, there's pretty much zero question that Augustus Caesar existed. Interestingly some question the existance of his step-great-grandson Caligula. Caligula himself surely existed, but many of the details of his life have been obscured by political propaganda.
The religious complain about how the records were poor back then, but nobody is confused about whether Socrates lived.
Actually, some scholars do think that Socrates may have actually been an allegorical construct of his "students", although there is little doubt that Aristotle and Plato existed. Most scholars still hold that Socrates probably did actually exist, but that his own writings haven't survived.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. If George W Bush isn't actually a Christian, then his statement makes sense. If he is, however, and believes that Jesus/God is omniscient, then things get more complicated. Philosopher literally means something like "lover of wisdom/knowledge", but the standard connotation is someone who seeks knowledge. An omniscient being, by definition, does not seek knowledge. There would be no reason to.
On the other hand, many of the ideas espoused by Jesus in the bible do constitute a philosophy. So, as the central figure of the philosophy, Jesus could sort of be seen as an honorary philosopher.
As soon as gays and lesbians can have children without scientific intervention, they can get married, until then, they can be lovers/friends/partners, but not married - that is reserved by definition for couples that can, under normal circumstances, conceive children for the survival of the human race. All religions have this built into their mantra some place or another.
So, only fertile couples can get married? What about couples who thought they were fertile and found out later that they weren't? Does that annul their marriage, or do they have to get divorced? Or is it just too late for them and they need to be stoned to death as adulterers?
"...your original claim that 'nefesh shaya' is what differentiates us from animals..."
I made no such claim. The term is not an attribute, it is a descriptor.
First, it seems to me that you did make such a claim when you replied to an AC near the start of this thread:
In spite of that, a lot of Christians - I hesitate to claim the majority - hate to be reminded that they are animals.
I decline your category offer.
We are nefesh chaya, the implications of which I won't get into here, as you won't be interested and evolution will inevitably sort you out anyway.
Then you went on to try to be snarky and insulting and holier-than-thou by saying that the AC was an animal, but that you personally were something better. Anyway, unless there's invisible extra text in there that I need magic diamond glasses to read, you're saying that you reject the AC's categorization of humans as animals and claim that humans are nefesh chaya instead. This makes no sense since humans and other animlas are both either nefesh chaya or posess nefesh chaya depending on exactly how you translate and interpret nefesh chaya: "living soul" or "animal" (from the Latin: Anima, meaning "breath" or "soul") or perhaps "organism". A "living soul" could be a descriptor saying what something is, but could also be an attribute that something posesses depending on point of view and exact translation. Either way, it's not something that differentiates humans and other animals.
As I later explicitly used English for in an elaborating argument, categorizing both humans and animals as "living souls" (or "living beings") is not synonymous with stating that humans are a subcategory of animals.
In the context we're using, humans are clearly a subcategory of "living souls". The set of "living souls" is the set of all animals. You believe that humans possess special properties that make them stand out from the set. So what. Many members of the set have special qualities that make them stand out from the set, they're still in the set. I mean, for crying out loud, as I pointed out earlier, the word "animal" comes from a latin word which literally means virtually the same thing as "living soul"/nefesh chaya.
Here is an early Google hit which brief review indicates I'm in agreement with.
Ok. So, to be clear, you're definitely either 100% pro-choice when it comes to abortion (including late term abortion) or you're a vegan, right? Because if you're in agreement with that article, you have to be one of those things since it's very clear that, until the moment of birth, a human is no different than any other animal. So, you should only object to abortions at any point before birth if you also completely object to killing animals for any reason, in which case you should be a Vegan to remain philosophically consistant.
Aside from that, what about all the animals that can reason, even if not better than the average human? There are animals that can reason better than a minority of humans (not to mention infant humans whose reasoning capacity is dwarfed by that of nearly all other mammals). Then there's speech, which is also posessed by a number of animals, either through sign languauge or outright ability to form audible words. Then there are those who posess some form of speech and also some reasoning capacity. So, is that the way it is? Humans, parrots and gorillas on a pedestal, raised up above the scum that are the rest of the kingdom animalia? Sure, the chimpanzees can't get into the club because they bite (and human children never, ever, ever do that), but what are you gonna do, you know?
P.S. I'm interested by your signature, which is an excerpt from the gospel of Mary Magdelene. It seems an odd contrast here with your rigid and orthodox view of humanities place among (or not among) the other animals.
BMI is now 22
Whoziwazzit now? Weight divided by height squared? What a sad, pathetic world we live in where this is considered in any way meaningful. It's meant as a statistical tool for populations, not individuals. Sure, a very high BMI will always be obese, and a very low BMI will be emaciated, but it's utterly meaningless through most of its range. I mean, there isn't even a different formula for men and women. Honestly, a simple visual inspection gives more meaningful information. It disgusts me that doctors use it.
Glucose, a carb, is a complex sugar, where fructose and sucrose are simple sugars. The inability to process food correctly give a pathway for the simple sugars to go undigested and wreak havoc on the gut flora.
Confused about that one. How is sucrose, which is a disacchiride composed of a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule, simpler than glucose?
The term "Mach's principle" was coined by Einstein, who was crediting Mach for the basic idea, even though Einstein came up with the specifics.
It's fairly clear what you're saying. You're saying: "nyah, nyah, you claim to know the music of Jimmy Hendrix, but you don't really, because you can't actually hear Jimmy. Only I can hear Jimmy."
I've replied elsewhere, but I think this would be another good place to point this out. "Nefesh Shaya" appears in Genesis 1:20-21:
20: And God said: "Let the waters teem with crawling beings of living soul (Nefesh Chaya) and birds that fly over the earth across the expanse of the heavens."
21: And God created the great sea giants and every living soul (nefesh hachaya) which creeps that the waters teemed with their kinds; and all winged bird to its kind. And God saw that it was good
So, based on that, your original claim that "nefesh shaya" is what differentiates us from animals is nonsense since, by some translations, it literally means "animal". By other translations, it still means something that, at the very least, definitely applies to some sea life. So, is it that humans and lobsters are special and unique and apart from all other living things, or are you just making up your own interpretation?
We are nefesh chaya, the implications of which I won't get into here, as you won't be interested and evolution will inevitably sort you out anyway.
Sorry if you have a different interpretation here, but doesn't "nefesh chaya" translate as something like "living beast" (alternatively, "living soul", but passages that mention it specifically allude to the fact that all animals posess this quality)? Aren't all animals nefesh chaya (or possessing nefesh chaya, depending on your definition), making your distinction meaningless in this context?
I not only agree with you, but need to shake my head every time some apologist changes words like "beat" into "hit."
The terms seem fairly synonymous to me. Not to mention all we know is what we read in news articles. "Beat" probably wasn't used at all in the earliest news stories, because they probably weren't in English. If we want to know if this was a wanton, savage beating, or just a case of stunning and disorienting the drivers (still bad, but not the vicious, bloodthirsty event you're painting from your connotations of "beaten"), we'll have to hope that there's security camera footage that will be released. Otherwise, we just get what are virtually guaranteed to be poor summaries written by desk jockies whose primary job is rewriting copy to say more or less the same thing without actually being identifiable as plagiarism.
It isn't hate. There is an equally rational side that suggest that painful death as a consequence/punishment of violent crime DOES have a deterrent effect, even if minor.
If it's pure pragmatism driving the decision, then the question becomes whether the decreased crime from the deterrant effect of painful death as a punishment is greater or less than the _increased_ crime from the same. It's fairly obvious that there will be at least some people who will prevent themselves from committing a crime when the punishment for that crime is horrible. The thing is, there will be plenty of people who will still commit crimes anyway. Some of those criminials will inevitably be witnessed, or will have someone try to stop/capture them. With the prospect of painful death as a punishment, even a small child who happens to glimpse the face of a criminal becomes a deadly enemy who needs to be dealt with. So, inevitably, as punishments get harsher, the people who will committ crimes anyway will committ additional crimes in order to cover up the original crimes. So, once again, we have to ask whether the reduction in crime from one angle is greater or less than the increase in crime from another.
Another angle to consider is respect for law and order. Some people equate fear and respect. Some people respect others for their displays of dominance, strength and brutality. Many of the supposed fans of law and order seem to fetishize inhumanity towards ciminal undesirables. Just look at, for example, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa county. As far as I can tell, he's corrupt, not actually particularly effective, and costs his constituency far more than he's worth. But many people love him and keep voting him in because he's brutal to the people kept in his jail (which, as a jail, houses a fair number of people who have not yet been convicted). The problem is, there are plenty of people who, rather than being excited by such things, are disgusted by them instead. They lose respect for the "law" because it appears to be just case after case after case of might making right, with actual law and order being ignored by people who think that they _are_ the law. The damage to society that sort of thing can cause shouldn't be discounted.
Capitalism is how money works when left alone.
Does money work when left alone? Pretty much every form of "money" ever, including gold and other precious metals, has worked by government or public consensus controlling its value. By that definition, capitalism only applies to barter.
Well, if you support allowing convicts guns while they're in prison I have to give you some credit for maintaining a consistent position.
Where in the 2nd amendment does it say that "mentally ill" people can't have guns, or anything close to that?
For a single sentence, the 2nd amendment spawns a lot of differing interpretations. Not even going into all the possibile interpretations about the "well regulated militia" part, it's important to note that it says that the right is of "the people" generally, and not individuals specifically. Anyway, interpretations may vary.
One important thing to note is that it has always been the case that the rights guaranteed by the constitution are not, in fact, guaranteed. Rather they're conditional. Convicts and children, for example, aren't given full rights to free speech or to free association, or to vote. So, the question is, does the absolute right to bear arms extend to incarcerated convicts? Newborn infants? The mentally incompetant? Without arguing one way or another, I'm going to say that denying rights, including rights to bear arms, due to status (age, mental competance, criminal status, gender, race, etc.) is not a new phenomenon and by no means applied exclusively to gun ownership.
First of all I'm not "Left WIng" Im as pro second ammendment as they come.
I'm confused. You have to be against the second amendment to be liberal now?
if she were wanting to come on a long term basis, she certainly shouldn't be allowed to com
I'm just aghast at this. How do you even respond to something like that?
I've spent a year abroad and it'll put you through the ringer
Care to elaborate on exactly which war zone you travelled to?
What you either don't know or are just ignoring is that Assange is Australian. Australia is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. Australia might be able to get away with extraditing one of its own citizens to the US for a crime that's only supposed to be a crime when US citizens do it and that happened outside of US jurisdiction. If England does it, it creates a political problem both in England and in Australia. Sweden is a different story.
I'm curious how something so incredibly ignorant can be marked insightful:
Joe Biden: "I would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers."
Mitch McConnell: ""a high-tech terrorist.. he has done enormous damage to our country. I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law"
Newt Gingrich: "Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant."
Sarah Palin called for him to be pursued "with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders"
There's a whole list of influential congresspersons and other people in government who have called for his assassination or prosecution. It's public knowledge that the Attorney general has worked on prosecuting him, and there's been a grand jury, although the actual outcome is secret.
Basically, whether you think he should be prosecuted/assassinated or not, you would have to be living in a cave or willfully ignorant, or simply deceitful to claim that the US doesn't want him.
Actually, going by his .sig, I'm pretty sure he set them all on fire with his mind.
The Doctor is half human in the same way that the immortals from Highlander are alien convicts from the planet Zeist. In other words, why did the Highlander movies skip right from 1 to 3 with no part 2?
Spying is a loaded yet vague term.
Collecting private and/or secret information on people without their knowledge and against their will. Seems to describe what they're doing and is simultaneously a suitable definition of "spying".
The collected information certainly can be abused — and potentially grossly so. But the same can be said about the very Internet-connectivity the TV boasts — and certainly about its use of the advanced Operating System (Linux) inside. All of those can be used unethically — easily — but are they? Until we know, how the data is used, we can not claim unethical behavior — though we'd be damn right to suspect it.
That's not right. I'm not sure if you're trying to employ misdirection or if you're honestly mistaken. The spying is unethical all by itself. Yes, the use to which the information is used can make it more or less unethical, but don't try to convince me that picking someone's lock, sneaking into their house, then cleaning the place isn't a crime. The police certainly won't see it that way. Even less so if you're only sneaking into their house to harmlessly check their underwear drawer to see what their favorite color is.
Which wire are you claiming is being tapped here? You purchased an "Internet-ready" TV-set and connected it to the Internet yourself... The device does not tap your (nor anyone else's) communications — it originates its own...
I'm working under the same theory that the authorities work under during many of the wiretapping prosecutions lately. As for what's being tapped, it's the communications between yourself, and other devices such as storage devices, that's being tapped.
And what LG collects may not even be considered personally identifiable — neither your name nor address are even known to the TV, much less reported by it, even if a dedicated investigator may be able to link the TV's serial number to you eventually.
Well, sure, absolutely... except for, you know, the _warranty registration_! Not to mention that it's not as if there aren't plenty of other ways to automatically collect that information.
Ironically, you would then probably be criminally charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Not unethical?! Are you joking? Secretly spying on people is not unethical? As for not illegal? That's a tougher question. It almost certainly violates the letter of various wiretapping laws. The trouble is, the actual application of those laws might apply to a regular individual spying on, for example, LG. Vice versa, however, the laws are likely to be ignored.
He almost certainly was real, and the majority of scholars think so. I was just pointing out that even for Socrates, there is some doubt as to his existance. A better example for the original poster might have been Augustus Caesar. He was actually alive during the time that Jesus was said to be alive, although he died about 16 years before the majority of the events attributed to him in the bible are said to have taken place. In any case, there's pretty much zero question that Augustus Caesar existed. Interestingly some question the existance of his step-great-grandson Caligula. Caligula himself surely existed, but many of the details of his life have been obscured by political propaganda.
The religious complain about how the records were poor back then, but nobody is confused about whether Socrates lived.
Actually, some scholars do think that Socrates may have actually been an allegorical construct of his "students", although there is little doubt that Aristotle and Plato existed. Most scholars still hold that Socrates probably did actually exist, but that his own writings haven't survived.