Do they? Or is that just what they want you to think?
Re:Social hack - use "bullfight" for "speed trap".
on
Is Your GPS Naive?
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· Score: 1
If anything, someone tailgating me is usually treated to my slowing down
Of course. The distance between the cars should match the speed, and if the other guy can't be bothered to adapt the distance to the speed, it's your responsibility to adapt the speed to the distance. For the safety. Of BOTH of you.
Java has gotten to the point where we feel comfortable developing systems under Windows that will be deployed under Linux.
Unnnghh... why would you want to do that? Glad that for me it's the other way round. (Unless I have to test our COM-based MS Office integration. Funnily enough that doesn't work to well on my ubuntu box.)
If you thinking science, it is outside of scientific truth or false.
So not only I can't know whether your statement is true or false, it might also be both at once or neither?
If you are searching for meaning of life, for real, then you will find it.
I don't need religion to give my life meaning. I can do that myself.
Tell me what is the meaning of your life: to "have a great time"?
Sounds reasonable to me.
Atheist does sometimes something that he does not want to do, but he does it only for worldy reasons: self-preservation, or preservation of his family, or preservation of his species.
Why do you pray? To please god. Why do you want to please god? Either because you love him, because you're afraid of punishment or because you expect reward. I've done plenty of things out of love, fear of punishment or for a reward. It's the same thing.
Animals act randomly. Believers do not.
Explain to me why you don't believe in Shiva and Odin, and how your choice not to believe in any deity but one is any less random than my choice to believe in none.
1. About difference of religions: this is also a test. There is only one true religion - Islam, religion of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and the Seal of the Prophets - Prophet Mohammad, sal Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam.
Above statement can be true or false. How could I possibly know? I can't. Because if I knew, there would be no test. Obviously you guess that the statement is true and let it govern your life. Why? I don't understand, and maybe I simply can't.
2. So you are refusing to believe in God that is not antropomorphic? That is what you said. God has to be "humane" in your terms.
I don't believe in god. It's not that I'm refusing anything. I look at the world and from what I can tell, my wife, flowers and cars exist; unicorns , giants, Thor, Shiva and the flying spaghetti monster don't exist, and neither does any other god. I can't bring myself to believe in the anthropomorphic and inhumane gods the religions are describing. It seems too apparent that that's just people making shit up.
It seems that the only reason you do not believe in God and believe in tsunamis is because the first one is unseen and the second one is visible, it is not about morality.
Yes and no. For example, I haven't witnessed a tsunami personally, but the descriptions of how a tsunami works in general and the reports of any given tsunami are something I can comprehend and think about. If I hear about a tsunami, I could go to wherever it happened and look at the results, talk to the survivors, I could start studying and learn to read the seismographs and calculate for myself where the thing came from.
In your view, you are growing up making stupid mistakes as a youngster, work your butt off in middle age, age in plethora of painful deseases and in the end of all this sufferring - NOTHING?
In the end, I had a great time. I could quote Frank Sinatra here, but I won't.:)
[the theist] does what he pleases, or in general accord with animal instincts of preservation of himself and his genes.
The theist does the same, except that "self-preservation" doesn't fail when he dies, but instead fails if he disappoints his deity enough to be eternally damned.
The life of the atheist is a life of an animal.
There once was an experiment, where they put animals (rats?) in cages and had a dispenser give them food completely at random. The animals started acting as if it was their actions that caused the action and tried to repeat what they were doing at the time they last got food. They ended up doing elaborate dances hoping to get goodies. That must be the life of a theist then.
[1] Actually, religions aren't useless for non-god-related purposes. They can hold together societies, help unite people for a common goal, and provide a feeling of meaning to people. Believing in an afterlife can make death seem less tragic, making the hurt of losing loved ones more bearable. That's all great but it doesn't imply that any religion is telling the truth.
This religion states that nothing you can do will get you into heaven. Through sin, you're simply not good enough. Therefore, God paid for your sin through Jesus, reconciling you with him in heaven after your death.
Pfft. Same difference. Accept christ as your saviour and try to follow the rules (if you fail, confess and get another try. but you REALLY have to try.), go to heaven. Don't accept christ, ignore the rules and don't repent your sins, go to hell. Be born too early, so you couldn't have possibly known about christ, go to hell.
After all, if it didn't matter after all, why try to follow the rules at all?
without belief in unseen there is no test for humans.
But without a meaningful possibility to find out what rules we are actually expected to adhere to, the test just tests how good we are at guessing the rules.
For example, i like to eat certain kinds of seafood, i eat pork and drink alcohol. So i constantly sin against the rules of Islam and Judaism, but the rules of (catholic) Christianity seem to allow my tastes (since Christians can apparently disregard certain parts of the old testament as long as they aren't about homosexuality).
If the rules about food aren't relevant, why have them in the first place?
Of course, theres broad consensus about certain very basic rules. "Don't kill other people without a good reason" seems to be a popular rule in almost every religion, but good luck finding two members of even the same religion that agree on the exact definition of said "good reason".
before you continue accusing the Creator in inhumanity
I'm not accusing god of being inhumane; I'm claiming that - to the best of my (limited) knowledge - the god(s) that the religions describe are described as being inhumane. So inhumane in fact that - regarding the beauty of the universe and life - I simply cannot believe said descriptions.
As you can see, If I'm accusing god of anything its either inexistence or incomprehensibility. But blaming metaphysical entities isn't my pair of shoes, so I'd rather accuse people of making god up[1].
[1] Please note that people making god up doesn't neccessarily imply that no god exists.
You're right about my rant, should have had some coffee before (read: instead of) writing that.
I still claim that god hiding himself and the rules he wants people to follow yet threatening damnation to all who don't follow the rules doesn't sound particularly humane to me.
Qur'an states many times that the key component of the belief is belief in UNSEEN, that is not detectable by any scientific method
I've heared those kind of statements before, and of course not only from muslims. But it just seems completely pointless[1] to me.
God: "I'll give you some scriptures that you have to believe in and that outline a bunch of random rules you have to follow (what you can wear, what you can eat, under what circumstances you can kill each other, etc). They'll be written at a certain point in time, and other scriptures that you have to ignore will be written at other points in time. I won't give you any meaningful way of distinguishing between the 'true' scriptures and the 'false' ones. Actually I won't give you any meaningful way of knowing whether I actually exist, much less what I want you to do or not do. From time to time I'll talk to some random guy 'in person' and he'll be a prophet. He'll tell you about it. There will also be other guys that claim (and believe) they are prophets and tell you all kinds of stuff but they aren't. You have no meaningful way to distinguish between those two types but you absolutely must follow the 'right' ones. Feel free to throw stones at the 'false' ones, but don't mix them up.
Oh yeah, those of you that don't follow my rules and prophets will be punished."
Joe Sixpack: "Sounds fair. Why bother with rules and prophets in the first place? Why not just throw dice and punish us randomly?"
God: "Shut up, I'm trying to be mysterious here. By the way, I just noted that your languages and cultures change all the time so at any given time only experts are able to completely grok books written just a few hundred years ago. Did I mention that I won't just send new scriptures or prophets every couple of years? I hope you enjoyed the manual for your chinese VCR that was translated chinese->korean->gaelic->klingon->english with babelfish because I'll give you plenty more of that kind of text."
[1] Pointless if there actually IS a god and he DOES care about us people and SOME scriptures/rules/prophets ARE actually sent from him. If we assume that all religions are just made up by humans, the "mystery" thing obviosly helps with adapting the rules should the need arise.
The main failure of National Socialism was that it is idiotic to incite hatred against, deport and kill a significant part of your population (including some of its brightest heads, greatest artists and whatnot) just because you don't like their noses.
Also, going to war against multiple of your neighbours isn't a very clever thing to do.
Also, trusting national leadership to a bunch of people (with one of them being presented as almost god-like) without being able to remove the from power if they aren't up to the task or abuse their power isn't in the "Running A Country: Best Practices" book.
Nobody can possibly expect any entity to sell digital media files without some form of protection. Otherwise, you're just selling files that everyone will immediately distribute to ruin your business.
We could argue about whether a track on an Audio CD is a "file" (it certainly is digital media), but IMO its similar enough to count as just that, and i've bought plenty of those and never ruined anyones business.
if they don't crate the song they are not creating art
What constitutes creating a song? Beethoven didn't write the lyrics for the choral part in the final of his 9. symphony himself. Plenty of composers wrote specific arrangements of other people's songs. Is that all without artistic value?
What about dancers that perform a choreography created by someone else? Think Swan Lake, not New Kids On The Block. What about cover versions?
Considering the chimp-in-chief considers the Constitution a "goddamned piece of paper" while the Attorney General considers it "an outdated document", you don't think he really cares about infringing the rights of citizens, do you?
Shockingly enough, Germany doesn't even have a constitution.
The children are likely not German, so they're not protecting the german children.
So if I drive a few miles to the Austrian-German border (I'm Austrian, btw.), whip out my RPG launcher and lob a few rockets over to the Piefkes, it would be wrong of Austrian law enforcement to stop me and/or prosecute me? After all, I'm not hurting any Austrians, am I?
They are telling people what they cannot do.
That's the whole point of having laws.
What is the reason for banning viewing these things?
First of all, AFAIK, viewing isn't banned, it's possession that's banned.
Of course for someone to view/possess child porn, someone else will have to produce it, which - ignoring the issue of "virtual" child porn - presumably involves raping children, and maybe a little kidnapping beforehand (unless the parents are involved), murdering afterwards (if they don't die from the damage done by the raping anyways).
One might reasonably argue that for viewing child porn, assuming you can't be bothered to produce it yourself, you first have to obtain child porn - directly or indirectly - from someone who produces said child porn for you and is willing to give it to you.
Humans being selfish beasts (especially humans selfish enough to rape children for their own fun/profit), they won't exactly pay you to take it, it might even be the other way round (i.e. you pay THEM to sell you the child porn, in lawyerese also called "buying it from them").
Now, the funny thing is, money can be used to buy stuff. People need some stuff (e.g. food), and want some other stuff (e.g. a pimped out ride) so people usually do shit to get money to buy said stuff.
Now if there are people that offer money for child porn (the "buying" thingamajig described above), those who are offered the money might think about the shit they can buy with said money and might decide that raping some kids might be a reasonable effort to get said money to buy said shit.
This is called an "economic incentive", and by buying child porn you create such an "economic incentive" to produce child porn.
Now some cultures see raping children as something that should be avoided if possible, even threatening sanctions againts people who act against that convention. Said cultures might conclude that it would be reasonable to threaten sanctions againts creating economic incentives to rape children, too.
They are literally telling people what they cannot do in their own homes even when it doesn't hurt anyone.
They also put a guy in prison for cutting off another guy's dick, eating it, killing the other guy and putting him in the freezer to eat later, even though the other guy actually wanted the first guy to do exactly that. Not only that, they also have gun control laws, drug laws and a metric shitload of other laws that tell people what they cannot do, anywhere on german soil including their own homes, even if it doesn't hurt anyone. Damn fascists.
After all, they will be locked up with the key thrown away
You're talking about Germany here. Mounir El Motassadeq has just been found guilty of aiding and abetting murder in 246 cases (passengers and crew of the 9/11 flights) and membership in a terrorist organization, and has been sentenced to the maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
While I don't have the faintest idea what the maximum penalty for owning child porn is in Germany, they certainly won't get any more than that. Some of them will - as I heard in the news today - get away with fines.
(I'm not saying that the penalties should be worse, nor am I saying that they shouldn't. Just disputing the darwin award nomination.)
it is highly unlikely that these bills will prove that they have been buying child porn
The police raided the houses of those people and presumably found more evidence. At least that's what they said on the news, showing policemen sifting through a bunch of photos.
they will still be charged and convicted with the rest
I think we can safely assume that each one will get their own trial and that those will be reasonably fair.
Of course that doesn't mean that innocent people's lifes won't be ruined by people unable to fathom that someone might be arrested or even tried for something that he didn't actually do, but you can't possibly prevent that as long as you have any kind of juridical system.
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Do they? Or is that just what they want you to think?
Of course. The distance between the cars should match the speed, and if the other guy can't be bothered to adapt the distance to the speed, it's your responsibility to adapt the speed to the distance. For the safety. Of BOTH of you.
At least in theory.
touché
Unnnghh... why would you want to do that? Glad that for me it's the other way round. (Unless I have to test our COM-based MS Office integration. Funnily enough that doesn't work to well on my ubuntu box.)
So not only I can't know whether your statement is true or false, it might also be both at once or neither?
I don't need religion to give my life meaning. I can do that myself.
Sounds reasonable to me.
Why do you pray? To please god. Why do you want to please god? Either because you love him, because you're afraid of punishment or because you expect reward. I've done plenty of things out of love, fear of punishment or for a reward. It's the same thing.
Explain to me why you don't believe in Shiva and Odin, and how your choice not to believe in any deity but one is any less random than my choice to believe in none.
Above statement can be true or false. How could I possibly know? I can't. Because if I knew, there would be no test. Obviously you guess that the statement is true and let it govern your life. Why? I don't understand, and maybe I simply can't.
I don't believe in god. It's not that I'm refusing anything. I look at the world and from what I can tell, my wife, flowers and cars exist; unicorns , giants, Thor, Shiva and the flying spaghetti monster don't exist, and neither does any other god. I can't bring myself to believe in the anthropomorphic and inhumane gods the religions are describing. It seems too apparent that that's just people making shit up.
Yes and no. For example, I haven't witnessed a tsunami personally, but the descriptions of how a tsunami works in general and the reports of any given tsunami are something I can comprehend and think about. If I hear about a tsunami, I could go to wherever it happened and look at the results, talk to the survivors, I could start studying and learn to read the seismographs and calculate for myself where the thing came from.
In the end, I had a great time. I could quote Frank Sinatra here, but I won't.
The theist does the same, except that "self-preservation" doesn't fail when he dies, but instead fails if he disappoints his deity enough to be eternally damned.
There once was an experiment, where they put animals (rats?) in cages and had a dispenser give them food completely at random. The animals started acting as if it was their actions that caused the action and tried to repeat what they were doing at the time they last got food. They ended up doing elaborate dances hoping to get goodies. That must be the life of a theist then.
[1] Actually, religions aren't useless for non-god-related purposes. They can hold together societies, help unite people for a common goal, and provide a feeling of meaning to people. Believing in an afterlife can make death seem less tragic, making the hurt of losing loved ones more bearable. That's all great but it doesn't imply that any religion is telling the truth.
Yeah, yeah. But in soviet russia, SCO only works for lawyers!
Bomb the UN?
Pfft. Same difference. Accept christ as your saviour and try to follow the rules (if you fail, confess and get another try. but you REALLY have to try.), go to heaven. Don't accept christ, ignore the rules and don't repent your sins, go to hell. Be born too early, so you couldn't have possibly known about christ, go to hell.
After all, if it didn't matter after all, why try to follow the rules at all?
But without a meaningful possibility to find out what rules we are actually expected to adhere to, the test just tests how good we are at guessing the rules.
For example, i like to eat certain kinds of seafood, i eat pork and drink alcohol. So i constantly sin against the rules of Islam and Judaism, but the rules of (catholic) Christianity seem to allow my tastes (since Christians can apparently disregard certain parts of the old testament as long as they aren't about homosexuality).
If the rules about food aren't relevant, why have them in the first place?
Of course, theres broad consensus about certain very basic rules. "Don't kill other people without a good reason" seems to be a popular rule in almost every religion, but good luck finding two members of even the same religion that agree on the exact definition of said "good reason".
I'm not accusing god of being inhumane; I'm claiming that - to the best of my (limited) knowledge - the god(s) that the religions describe are described as being inhumane. So inhumane in fact that - regarding the beauty of the universe and life - I simply cannot believe said descriptions.
As you can see, If I'm accusing god of anything its either inexistence or incomprehensibility. But blaming metaphysical entities isn't my pair of shoes, so I'd rather accuse people of making god up[1].
[1] Please note that people making god up doesn't neccessarily imply that no god exists.
You're right about my rant, should have had some coffee before (read: instead of) writing that.
I still claim that god hiding himself and the rules he wants people to follow yet threatening damnation to all who don't follow the rules doesn't sound particularly humane to me.
From this piece of dialogue we can obviously infer that god doesn't play dice.
I've heared those kind of statements before, and of course not only from muslims. But it just seems completely pointless[1] to me.
God: "I'll give you some scriptures that you have to believe in and that outline a bunch of random rules you have to follow (what you can wear, what you can eat, under what circumstances you can kill each other, etc). They'll be written at a certain point in time, and other scriptures that you have to ignore will be written at other points in time. I won't give you any meaningful way of distinguishing between the 'true' scriptures and the 'false' ones. Actually I won't give you any meaningful way of knowing whether I actually exist, much less what I want you to do or not do. From time to time I'll talk to some random guy 'in person' and he'll be a prophet. He'll tell you about it. There will also be other guys that claim (and believe) they are prophets and tell you all kinds of stuff but they aren't. You have no meaningful way to distinguish between those two types but you absolutely must follow the 'right' ones. Feel free to throw stones at the 'false' ones, but don't mix them up.
Oh yeah, those of you that don't follow my rules and prophets will be punished."
Joe Sixpack: "Sounds fair. Why bother with rules and prophets in the first place? Why not just throw dice and punish us randomly?"
God: "Shut up, I'm trying to be mysterious here. By the way, I just noted that your languages and cultures change all the time so at any given time only experts are able to completely grok books written just a few hundred years ago. Did I mention that I won't just send new scriptures or prophets every couple of years? I hope you enjoyed the manual for your chinese VCR that was translated chinese->korean->gaelic->klingon->english with babelfish because I'll give you plenty more of that kind of text."
[1] Pointless if there actually IS a god and he DOES care about us people and SOME scriptures/rules/prophets ARE actually sent from him. If we assume that all religions are just made up by humans, the "mystery" thing obviosly helps with adapting the rules should the need arise.
Nobody knows, but the step after that will be Profit!
No wonder you get angry if people claim Vista to be using irrational amounts of RAM.
The main failure of National Socialism was that it is idiotic to incite hatred against, deport and kill a significant part of your population (including some of its brightest heads, greatest artists and whatnot) just because you don't like their noses.
Also, going to war against multiple of your neighbours isn't a very clever thing to do.
Also, trusting national leadership to a bunch of people (with one of them being presented as almost god-like) without being able to remove the from power if they aren't up to the task or abuse their power isn't in the "Running A Country: Best Practices" book.
etc. etc.
Fine, I'll write my own birthday song...with blackjack...and hookers! In fact, forget the birthday song and the blackjack!
We could argue about whether a track on an Audio CD is a "file" (it certainly is digital media), but IMO its similar enough to count as just that, and i've bought plenty of those and never ruined anyones business.
What constitutes creating a song? Beethoven didn't write the lyrics for the choral part in the final of his 9. symphony himself. Plenty of composers wrote specific arrangements of other people's songs. Is that all without artistic value?
What about dancers that perform a choreography created by someone else? Think Swan Lake, not New Kids On The Block.
What about cover versions?
Clever. dd if=arose.sig of=LittleBigLui.sig, if you don't mind.
Shockingly enough, Germany doesn't even have a constitution.
Well, okay, they do, they just don't call it one.
So if I drive a few miles to the Austrian-German border (I'm Austrian, btw.), whip out my RPG launcher and lob a few rockets over to the Piefkes, it would be wrong of Austrian law enforcement to stop me and/or prosecute me? After all, I'm not hurting any Austrians, am I?
That's the whole point of having laws.
First of all, AFAIK, viewing isn't banned, it's possession that's banned.
Of course for someone to view/possess child porn, someone else will have to produce it, which - ignoring the issue of "virtual" child porn - presumably involves raping children, and maybe a little kidnapping beforehand (unless the parents are involved), murdering afterwards (if they don't die from the damage done by the raping anyways).
One might reasonably argue that for viewing child porn, assuming you can't be bothered to produce it yourself, you first have to obtain child porn - directly or indirectly - from someone who produces said child porn for you and is willing to give it to you.
Humans being selfish beasts (especially humans selfish enough to rape children for their own fun/profit), they won't exactly pay you to take it, it might even be the other way round (i.e. you pay THEM to sell you the child porn, in lawyerese also called "buying it from them").
Now, the funny thing is, money can be used to buy stuff. People need some stuff (e.g. food), and want some other stuff (e.g. a pimped out ride) so people usually do shit to get money to buy said stuff.
Now if there are people that offer money for child porn (the "buying" thingamajig described above), those who are offered the money might think about the shit they can buy with said money and might decide that raping some kids might be a reasonable effort to get said money to buy said shit.
This is called an "economic incentive", and by buying child porn you create such an "economic incentive" to produce child porn.
Now some cultures see raping children as something that should be avoided if possible, even threatening sanctions againts people who act against that convention. Said cultures might conclude that it would be reasonable to threaten sanctions againts creating economic incentives to rape children, too.
They also put a guy in prison for cutting off another guy's dick, eating it, killing the other guy and putting him in the freezer to eat later, even though the other guy actually wanted the first guy to do exactly that. Not only that, they also have gun control laws, drug laws and a metric shitload of other laws that tell people what they cannot do, anywhere on german soil including their own homes, even if it doesn't hurt anyone. Damn fascists.
You're talking about Germany here. Mounir El Motassadeq has just been found guilty of aiding and abetting murder in 246 cases (passengers and crew of the 9/11 flights) and membership in a terrorist organization, and has been sentenced to the maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
While I don't have the faintest idea what the maximum penalty for owning child porn is in Germany, they certainly won't get any more than that. Some of them will - as I heard in the news today - get away with fines.
(I'm not saying that the penalties should be worse, nor am I saying that they shouldn't. Just disputing the darwin award nomination.)
The police raided the houses of those people and presumably found more evidence. At least that's what they said on the news, showing policemen sifting through a bunch of photos.
I think we can safely assume that each one will get their own trial and that those will be reasonably fair.
Of course that doesn't mean that innocent people's lifes won't be ruined by people unable to fathom that someone might be arrested or even tried for something that he didn't actually do, but you can't possibly prevent that as long as you have any kind of juridical system.