So your doctrines don't include racism, they just include the belief that skin color has been used to set apart the righteous from the unrighteous? What's your definition of racism, if a correlation between righteousness and inherited skin color doesn't qualify? A corpse flower by any other name would smell as awful, to make an old analogy a bit more direct.
As for Joseph Smith's actions, they didn't reflect on any principles that weren't subject to revision at whim. That's why he could preach monogamy in public and polygamy in private, preach in favor of abolitionism in the North and against it in the South. If he liked a black man enough to ordain him after writing scriptures forbidding it, that doesn't mean anything more than when he started plural marriage after quoting scriptures forbidding it or when he added already-married women to his "plural wives" after writing D&C 132:61. Smith simply felt that he controlled the rules, not vice versa. Of course that would leave his successors to decide whether to "do as I say, not as I do"; you can blame Brigham Young for taking a bad idea even farther, but not for coming up with it in the first place, not when he and the Mormon subgroup he was trying to lead had already been taught that it was part of God-revealed scripture.
But back to that "internal consistency": you seem to be arguing that because Joseph Smith's behavior wasn't always consistent with his scriptures, yours doesn't need to be consistent either. Do you think that claim refutes PitaBred's (admittedly too rudely expressed) point, or just strengthens it?
Good luck finding someone without cognitive bias; there's no such person. For myself, it wasn't until I was investigating Mormonism that I could take a less biased look at my own religion. "Those are really weak apologetics when you aren't already biased to believe their conclusions" tends to lead to "What would an objective outsider think of my own apologetics?" all too easily. Perhaps if you were to investigate the FLDS claims (or the Jehovah's Witnesses, whatever) you'd get some of the same perspective? But I doubt that that's a guarantee. I was stunned when hearing a local Mormon leader rail against the idea of raising children to choose their religious beliefs for themselves after growing up, because he thought that would be likely to lose many children to Mormonism altogether. Even if someone realizes that their beliefs aren't likely to appeal to an unbiased adult, that's still not necessarily enough to lead to the obvious corollary.
For example, polygamy - the scriptures make clear that polygamy is only permitted when God explicitly authorizes it (Abraham had multiple wives, as did Jacob; the Book of Mormon specifically teaches this principle).
For example, polygamy - while the Book of Mormon says it might be allowable under God's orders, when you get down to specific cases it says, "Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord." while D&C 132 specifically says, "David also received many wives and concubines, and also Solomon and Moses my servants, as also many others of my servants, from the beginning of creation until this time; and in nothing did they sin save in those things which they received not of me."
One book says that their "many wives and concubines" was a sin; the other goes on to say that only one of the wives of one of the men was a sin. How contradictory does something have to be before it can be admitted as a contradiction?
(a) I think he's probably just slightly misremembering Book of Mormon passages like these:
Nephi 5:21 - "And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them."
Alma 3:6 - "And the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their brethren, who consisted of Nephi, Jacob and Joseph, and Sam, who were just and holy men."
Nothing to do with Cain or African Blacks, but even after changing the "white and delightsome" passages, the Book of Mormon is still pretty clear in stating that God sometimes curses evil people by darkening their skin and their descendants' skin.
I'll assume that your failure to mention such relevant passages to PitaBred was just an honest mistake, but you should still apologize to him for insulting his research abilities while you were simultaneously telling him misleading half-truths.
(b) You are correct in identifying Brigham Young as one of the worst proponents of Mormonism's Curse of Cain interpretation. However, Young claimed to not be it's originator. He claimed that even the worst parts of it came from God: "Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God is death on the spot. This will always be so." And he claimed that the explanation for it came from Joseph Smith: "Joseph Smith had declared that the Negroes were not neutral in heaven, for all the spirits took sides, but 'the posterity of Cain are black because he (Cain) committed murder. He killed Abel and God set a mark upon his posterity'"
In particular, the first interpretation of the Curse of Cain in LDS scripture comes directly from Joseph Smith, in what he claimed was a revelation directly from God:
Moses 7:22 - "And Enoch also beheld the residue of the people which were the sons of Adam; and they were a mixture of all the seed of Adam save it was the seed of Cain, for the seed of Cain were black, and had not place among them"
I'm sorry if you've been told untruths about what your religious leaders believed, but that doesn't make it okay for you to spread those untruths to others. Assuming it was honest mistake, your punishment is this: now you have to decide whether those noxious beliefs themselves are true, or whether the leaders whose revelations you have been taught to trust were just telling more untruths in God's name. Good luck in coming to the right decision.
Also, moderators? Please don't mod ShatteredArm down, but in the future do remember that "+1, Informative" is intended for correct information only.
The Book of Mormon is a history of a small group of people that emmigrated from Jerusalem to NA. It's not a history of the entire Americas and everyone that has ever lived on it. Or even a majority. Or even a significant minority.
The canonized History of Joseph Smith claims that an angel told him the Book of Mormon was "an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the source from which they sprang." Not "one of the sources", or "some of the former inhabitants" - in fact the Book of Mormon itself describes populations in the millions, which "did cover the whole face of the land, both on the northward and on the southward, from the sea west to the sea east." Smith also described the Book of Mormon as one in which "the history of America is unfolded, from its first settlement by a colony that came from the Tower of Babel, at the confusion of languages to the beginning of the fifth century of the Christian era. We are informed by these records that America in ancient times has been inhabited by two distinct races of people. The first were called Jaredites and came directly from the Tower of Babel. The second race came directly from the city of Jerusalem, about six hundred years before Christ. They were principally Israelites, of the descendants of Joseph. The Jaredites were destroyed about the time that the Israelites came from Jerusalem, who succeeded them in the inheritance of the country. The principal nation of the second race fell in battle towards the close of the fourth century. The remnant are the Indians that now inhabit this country."
This is why Smith also confidently claimed to find artifacts like Nephite writings in New York, Nephite altars in Missouri, and Lamanite graves of men who were famous from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic. It's why his D&C revelations refer to North American Indian tribes as "Lamanites". If you've invented a different set of religious beliefs that are more compatible with real archeology, good for you, but you're going to have to do a lot more twisting to get it to fit the original claims of Mormonism.
She's the 14 year old girl who Joseph Smith bullied into marrying him by claiming that it would ensure the salvation of her family. There's plenty of more examples of fraud, but as long as the topic is El Dorado that one seems to be the most poignant. Todd Compton's book has references to primary sources for her and about thirty others of Smith's wives, if you'd like to check that out. Be aware that Compton is still a believing Mormon and so some bias shows through; for example when he quotes Helen's sorrow at finding out that her marriage wasn't just "for eternity", he suggests that that must just mean that Smith wasn't letting her date, rather than that Smith was using her for what his "revelation" on polygamy said his "plural wives" were for.
You're right that the FLDS Mormons aren't the same religion as the LDS Mormons, but that's because the FLDS sect is the one that still believes in the doctrines that the LDS were smart enough to back away from.
I wonder how those who talk about "gagging" here would actually want copyright laws to work?
I would like them to work the way it says in the Constitution, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". In other words, and excellent way for copyright to work is to temporarily restrict copying of new works, thus providing economic incentives for more new works to be published in the first place and enriching the public domain in the long run. Bad ways for copyright laws to work include:
Making that "temporary" restriction so long that old works can be lost entirely, or even just so long that the marginal promotion of the original work is less valuable than the still-forbidden creation of new derivative works.
Extending that restriction retroactively, which impedes rather than promotes the progress of new derivative works and the dissemination of the original but which (unless we invent time travel) gives no additional incentive to the original author's creation.
Or, as in the CHI cases, bad ways for copyright law to be used include:
Impeding the progress of history by making primary sources harder to come by.
Restricting the flow of factual information (in the case of the original CHI lawsuit, the excerpts were part of a "How to Remove Your Name From the LDS Records" instructional page) which seems to qualify for all four factors of "fair use"
Trying to apply economic incentives to the publication of a work whose authors have no interest in selling it and would happily keep it out of the public domain forever.
Trying to create a chilling effect to restrict criticism of a work.
And finally, even those of us who see this as "gagging" don't necessarily see the solution to be "fix copyright law". Fair use, in particular, is a tricky thing to legislate in advance and a tricky thing for a court to decide. In some cases, such as this one in my opinion, a better fix isn't to have the law on our side, but to have the public on our side. Note that even the Mormons posting here are disappointed by their church's action; hopefully that kind of backlash can lead to these legal demands being withdrawn due to persuasion, without the need for litigation.
So if you want to report about some weird/dangerous,/ridiculous issues in this book, provide a write-up (your own words of what is in there: legal) and support it with facsimiles of excerpts of the original (small parts: legal).
What would be the problem with that?
In the case of religious censorship, you just need to check out the apologetics to see the problem. Paraphrases and commentaries get dismissed as "persecution" and "lies"; small facsimiles are accused of being "taken out of context". Sometimes you really need to give people all the information available before you can get past all the walls trying to obscure it.
I hope the Church's spiritual leadership is swift to address what was likely a foolish bureaucratic decision.
If they were "swift" to conclude that this decision was foolish, they would have come to that conclusion back in 1999.
Kudos on your theory, though. "This is wrong, so it must not be my church's real policy", even if it's not always correct, is still much more morally sound than "This is my church's real policy, so it must not be wrong". There's a third alternative which is both logically and morally sound, but it conflicts with a premise that you might find it hard to drop first.;-)
Look at the priority the user requested for that packet, check to make sure the router you received the packet from hasn't filled their quota for that priority, and if not, give the packet that priority.
Remember when the internet was supposed to be a "dumb" network that could therefore be easily and seamlessly improved by just improving the software at the endpoints? Those were good times.
which ATM I am still able to post without fear of getting my door kicked in (I hope),YMMV
Not unless you live in a Texas compound with a wacky religious leader, at least.
There are lots of people who follow wacky religious leaders without getting their doors kicked in. You're even allowed to venerate "rapist" religious leaders instead of just "wacky" ones, like the most recent Texas cult did, and you can still get away with it. It's when your compound moves from "venerating" to "emulating" a rapist leader that you can expect the authorities to come knocking.
Iâ(TM)d like to say â"great postâ", but somehow Iâ(TM)ve found I canâ(TM)t focus on the âbirth rate gapâ(TM) discussion therein. Weâ(TM)d all appreciate it if your future postsâ(TM) punctuation was âoevalid HTMLâ ⦠thanks.
The White House's failure to follow records retention laws was due to deficiencies in Microsoft software?
I predict this will lead to a civil, thoughtful Slashdot discussion which results in many useful recommendations for avoiding similar problems in the future.
And no, "corporate shell gets disassembled by cheated creditors while the criminals in charge of it get away" is not a happy ending. That's an improvement over the ridiculous threats they were making to scare off Linux interest and lure in Microsoft "investment" money, but a real happy ending for the SCO scammers would involve more pitchforks and fire.
Actually, your analogy of tap water vs. bottled water hits the nail right on the head. it may just be the best analogy I've heard yet on the issue.
I was comparing tap water (lowest common denominator service to everyone) vs. filtered water (a few extra bucks a months for a significant improvement in quality), but bringing bottled water into the picture (a slight improvement in quality and convenience for a huge increase in price) does have some ramifications for health care: who decides how much expense is too much? I think that water filters are worth the cost but bottled water usually isn't. But, obviously lots of people drink unfiltered tap water, lots more buy generic or name brand bottled water, some even buy "designer" bottled water... who is to say which of us is right? With capitalism, we're all right, because we all get to make our own decisions about how much of our own money to spend. But when we're deciding how much of everyone's socialized money to spend, it's impossible to find some compromise that everyone can be happy with.
I mean, in any western developed country, it's hard to justify a system where somebody might die 'cause they can't afford chemotherapy or something, and that the status quo isn't really acceptable.
It's hard with that particular example; chemotherapy is pretty tried and true by now, and a cancer diagnosis is nothing to sneeze at. But would you like to pay to check out every single blemish I might want removed? Or would you agree with me that, while skin cancer is nothing to laugh about, most moles aren't malignant melanoma, and in the absence of suspicious changes or color it's not worth getting every mole on everyone's skin removed and biopsied? We're talking about a potentially life-or-death situation, but I'd still rather be able to make my own choice about where the tradeoffs lie between the risk of terminal cancer and the cost of unnecessary medical service. Insurance already removes much of that choice from the hands of the people most concerned with the consequences, but universal health care would remove even more.
One other thought: I think emergency care isn't really the sticky point, you probably won't get turned away if you show up at an emergency room with a gunshot wound.
Ah, but that depends on the emergency room being open when you show up in the first place. We like to think that we can prevent bad situations with "no refusal of service" sorts of laws, but just like the real minimum wage is a constant "zero dollars per hour", the real number of patients that an emergency room is allowed to turn away for non-payment is "all of them". Emergency room closures tend to get blamed on "illegal immigrants" lately, but the free-rider problem is there no matter where the people who can't or won't pay come from. With normal medical care the patient has time to shop around and the hospitals have the freedom to decide whom to treat, but when there's no time to choose a transaction then there's no way for the free market to work. The best you can do is hope that luck, human decency, or regulation will prevent one party from taking advantage of the other.
It's the chronic or more long-term care (think MS, IBS, diabetes, etc).
Within the limits of current medical science, chronic disease treatment wouldn't be as much of a problem if health insurance acted like, well, insurance. When my friend's car wrecked, her insurance company didn't just pay for a limited time lease and bump up her premiums to match, they covered the whole value so she could buy a replacement. If you're first diagnosed with a chronic illness while you're with insurance company X, an analogous service would be for them to assume the obligation of long-term care for that illness, whether or not you keep that company's coverage for other health risks. Insurance is supposed to be "inverse gambling" for the customer; too often health insurance seems to work more along the lines of "you still assume the same risks, but the insurer gets a cut off the top".
Your municipal tap water is "socialized", but it works pretty well, I think.
Not nearly as well as after the water's gone through the products of a capitalistic filter company, it doesn't.
But how about a compromise: can we socialize health care in the same way we socialize that tap water? In other words, can we socialize it on a municipality-by-municipality basis? That would get rid of the flaws inherent in raw capitalism for emergency care, but without having to subordinate every involved health care decision to a national bureaucracy. Even if "city by city" is too small a scale for visionaries to bother with, more liberal states like California or New York could pass a universal health care law without the massive fighting that's necessary to push something like that through at a federal level. Why haven't they? If they all do it right, then that will be a compelling argument for other states to follow. If some of them succeed and some of them fail then we can learn from the differences between them. And if all of them fail then at least it will be a more limited mistake.
How can you ethically justify having people die because they can't afford treatment?
How can you? You're spending time posting on Slashdot instead of working more hours to earn money for charity, aren't you? And that's a matter of not wanting to give away more of *your own* time and money; imagine how much easier it is to ethically justify a decision not to give away *other people's* time and money.
Please don't get holier-than-thou about what's already inevitably a touchy subject. The question is about what works best, not what's ethically unassailable. Even the proponents of "universal" health care think so, or they wouldn't interpret "universal" to mean "only people who live in the same country as us".
Who's going to bother listening to my "back in my day, we programmed uphill in the snow both ways" stories when I don't even bother to use a monospaced font!
And before I started up my 80x25 terminal window, I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.
For that reason, the news companies keep their reporters in check and fire those that do any true investigation. Look what happened to Peter Arnett.
I went to that Wikipedia link expecting to be reminded that Arnett had been fired for criticizing the current Iraq War, and yup, no big surprise, he said something mildly critical on Iraq TV and he got fired for it.
Then I read on, to the section where his daughter "Elsa married conservative law professor John Yoo."
Holy crap. Getting fired for criticizing Bush's War, that's one thing... but having Mr. Torture Memos marry your daughter? The Godfather was a freaking amateur; as punishments/threats go, this blows "severed horse's head in your bed" out of the water!
And even though you're rarely searching for something you've seen before, it's possible that knowledge of what you have seen before might still be used to put your searches into a better context.
If you're a parent planning to remodel your daughter's bathroom, for example: even though this may be the first time you've ever searched for fixtures with gender-specific decorations for children, a search engine that knows a bit about your demographics could probably give MUCH better results when you type in "tub girl".
Of course, if you try to do so, it's going to cost you. Even though a station wagon might be a less polluting and equally useful alternative to an SUV for many people, it turns out that some hamfisted regulator thought it would be a good idea to control pollution by applying stricter (albeit fleet averaged) emissions and fuel economy standards to "cars" without crippling the economy by applying the same standards to "trucks". Unfortunately (and not coincidentally), the people who are dumb enough to think they can successfully micromanage the world in this fashion are rarely smart enough to anticipate the unintended consequences of their edicts, such as the many families who wanted more cargo or towing capacity than the non-penalized "cars" would provide and who would therefore choose the loophole of buying an SUV "truck" instead.
Oops.
And stunningly enough, people don't seem to learn from these failures. You'd think that, at the very least, experiences like East vs West Germany or North vs South Korea might cause would-be regulators to be extra-careful about starting their own labyrinths of central planning, but I suppose some people never learn. Ideas like emissions taxation should make lovers of both freedom and the environment happy, but there may be other psychology at work here. Why would anyone with a fetish for controlling others be content to merely penalize people proportionately to the costs of the externalities they create? That just *influences* their decisions, which must not be nearly as satisfying as the hope of *eliminating* their decisions. Imagine being in a position to divvy up the world into categories while deciding "this category may pollute this much with no consequences, but not a kilogram more; that category may pollute that much; and if your think your category's allotment is unfair then you'd better find a good loophole or a good lobbyist to help you with that". It must be like playing SimCity but with real human lives.
The idea that the only allowable options for controlling ecological harm are a dichotomy of "regulatory bans" vs "unlimited extravagance" is an idea which only you believe in here; if you're making fun of it then you're only making fun of yourself.
Don't you remember, just a few posts ago, when someone suggested a decentralized way of discouraging unnecessarily excessive environmental harm which nevertheless allows individuals the freedom to make the tradeoffs between the environmental impacts and the benefits of things like LCDs and SUVs? You haven't actually addressed that suggestion, you just started throwing around insults and offering contrary ideas that are so ridiculous that even you yourself can't help but satirize the false dichotomy.
When your criticisms are so stupid that even you can't help but laugh at them, perhaps it's time to stop trying to dominate the discussion and start trying to learn from it.
I mean, if this hypothetical complete idiot was literate then he would have noticed that the discussion topic was climate change, right? But I suppose the idea of a literate complete idiot is a contradiction in terms. But hey, CO2 might indeed lead to species extinction, so clearly attempting to economically limit it via taxation is a stupid idea compared to banning CO2 emissions entirely. You hold your breath first. Let us all know how that goes.
Oh, but please don't let us know via the internet. Since you brought up the topic, you should know that computer and monitor you're using contains toxic heavy metals, and even if you're good about having them reclaimed you don't have a hope of influencing what happens to your ISP's hardware. Since even the smallest amount of groundwater poisoning is 100% intolerable, you wouldn't want to look like a hypocrite by helping to promote it.
Comcast is trying to stop SYN flooding just like many others stated in this thread.
So they're hoping that SYN flooders have all added a default --quit_on_rst_for_some_strange_reason option to their scripts? Of course not. Perhaps "Comcast is trying to block P2P and accidentally blocked HTTP in some cases" isn't the only possible theory, but at least it's a plausible one.
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So your doctrines don't include racism, they just include the belief that skin color has been used to set apart the righteous from the unrighteous? What's your definition of racism, if a correlation between righteousness and inherited skin color doesn't qualify? A corpse flower by any other name would smell as awful, to make an old analogy a bit more direct.
As for Joseph Smith's actions, they didn't reflect on any principles that weren't subject to revision at whim. That's why he could preach monogamy in public and polygamy in private, preach in favor of abolitionism in the North and against it in the South. If he liked a black man enough to ordain him after writing scriptures forbidding it, that doesn't mean anything more than when he started plural marriage after quoting scriptures forbidding it or when he added already-married women to his "plural wives" after writing D&C 132:61. Smith simply felt that he controlled the rules, not vice versa. Of course that would leave his successors to decide whether to "do as I say, not as I do"; you can blame Brigham Young for taking a bad idea even farther, but not for coming up with it in the first place, not when he and the Mormon subgroup he was trying to lead had already been taught that it was part of God-revealed scripture.
But back to that "internal consistency": you seem to be arguing that because Joseph Smith's behavior wasn't always consistent with his scriptures, yours doesn't need to be consistent either. Do you think that claim refutes PitaBred's (admittedly too rudely expressed) point, or just strengthens it?
Good luck finding someone without cognitive bias; there's no such person. For myself, it wasn't until I was investigating Mormonism that I could take a less biased look at my own religion. "Those are really weak apologetics when you aren't already biased to believe their conclusions" tends to lead to "What would an objective outsider think of my own apologetics?" all too easily. Perhaps if you were to investigate the FLDS claims (or the Jehovah's Witnesses, whatever) you'd get some of the same perspective? But I doubt that that's a guarantee. I was stunned when hearing a local Mormon leader rail against the idea of raising children to choose their religious beliefs for themselves after growing up, because he thought that would be likely to lose many children to Mormonism altogether. Even if someone realizes that their beliefs aren't likely to appeal to an unbiased adult, that's still not necessarily enough to lead to the obvious corollary.
For example, polygamy - the scriptures make clear that polygamy is only permitted when God explicitly authorizes it (Abraham had multiple wives, as did Jacob; the Book of Mormon specifically teaches this principle).
For example, polygamy - while the Book of Mormon says it might be allowable under God's orders, when you get down to specific cases it says, "Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord." while D&C 132 specifically says, "David also received many wives and concubines, and also Solomon and Moses my servants, as also many others of my servants, from the beginning of creation until this time; and in nothing did they sin save in those things which they received not of me."
One book says that their "many wives and concubines" was a sin; the other goes on to say that only one of the wives of one of the men was a sin. How contradictory does something have to be before it can be admitted as a contradiction?
(a) I think he's probably just slightly misremembering Book of Mormon passages like these:
Nephi 5:21 - "And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them."
Alma 3:6 - "And the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their brethren, who consisted of Nephi, Jacob and Joseph, and Sam, who were just and holy men."
Nothing to do with Cain or African Blacks, but even after changing the "white and delightsome" passages, the Book of Mormon is still pretty clear in stating that God sometimes curses evil people by darkening their skin and their descendants' skin.
I'll assume that your failure to mention such relevant passages to PitaBred was just an honest mistake, but you should still apologize to him for insulting his research abilities while you were simultaneously telling him misleading half-truths.
(b) You are correct in identifying Brigham Young as one of the worst proponents of Mormonism's Curse of Cain interpretation. However, Young claimed to not be it's originator. He claimed that even the worst parts of it came from God: "Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God is death on the spot. This will always be so." And he claimed that the explanation for it came from Joseph Smith: "Joseph Smith had declared that the Negroes were not neutral in heaven, for all the spirits took sides, but 'the posterity of Cain are black because he (Cain) committed murder. He killed Abel and God set a mark upon his posterity'"
In particular, the first interpretation of the Curse of Cain in LDS scripture comes directly from Joseph Smith, in what he claimed was a revelation directly from God:
Moses 7:22 - "And Enoch also beheld the residue of the people which were the sons of Adam; and they were a mixture of all the seed of Adam save it was the seed of Cain, for the seed of Cain were black, and had not place among them"
I'm sorry if you've been told untruths about what your religious leaders believed, but that doesn't make it okay for you to spread those untruths to others. Assuming it was honest mistake, your punishment is this: now you have to decide whether those noxious beliefs themselves are true, or whether the leaders whose revelations you have been taught to trust were just telling more untruths in God's name. Good luck in coming to the right decision.
Also, moderators? Please don't mod ShatteredArm down, but in the future do remember that "+1, Informative" is intended for correct information only.
The Book of Mormon is a history of a small group of people that emmigrated from Jerusalem to NA. It's not a history of the entire Americas and everyone that has ever lived on it. Or even a majority. Or even a significant minority.
The canonized History of Joseph Smith claims that an angel told him the Book of Mormon was "an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the source from which they sprang." Not "one of the sources", or "some of the former inhabitants" - in fact the Book of Mormon itself describes populations in the millions, which "did cover the whole face of the land, both on the northward and on the southward, from the sea west to the sea east." Smith also described the Book of Mormon as one in which "the history of America is unfolded, from its first settlement by a colony that came from the Tower of Babel, at the confusion of languages to the beginning of the fifth century of the Christian era. We are informed by these records that America in ancient times has been inhabited by two distinct races of people. The first were called Jaredites and came directly from the Tower of Babel. The second race came directly from the city of Jerusalem, about six hundred years before Christ. They were principally Israelites, of the descendants of Joseph. The Jaredites were destroyed about the time that the Israelites came from Jerusalem, who succeeded them in the inheritance of the country. The principal nation of the second race fell in battle towards the close of the fourth century. The remnant are the Indians that now inhabit this country."
This is why Smith also confidently claimed to find artifacts like Nephite writings in New York, Nephite altars in Missouri, and Lamanite graves of men who were famous from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic. It's why his D&C revelations refer to North American Indian tribes as "Lamanites". If you've invented a different set of religious beliefs that are more compatible with real archeology, good for you, but you're going to have to do a lot more twisting to get it to fit the original claims of Mormonism.
"Cut my toast! Cut my eggs! Cut my milk!"
"I can't, sir. It's liquid."
"Imbecile! Freeze it, then cut it!"
She's the 14 year old girl who Joseph Smith bullied into marrying him by claiming that it would ensure the salvation of her family. There's plenty of more examples of fraud, but as long as the topic is El Dorado that one seems to be the most poignant. Todd Compton's book has references to primary sources for her and about thirty others of Smith's wives, if you'd like to check that out. Be aware that Compton is still a believing Mormon and so some bias shows through; for example when he quotes Helen's sorrow at finding out that her marriage wasn't just "for eternity", he suggests that that must just mean that Smith wasn't letting her date, rather than that Smith was using her for what his "revelation" on polygamy said his "plural wives" were for.
You're right that the FLDS Mormons aren't the same religion as the LDS Mormons, but that's because the FLDS sect is the one that still believes in the doctrines that the LDS were smart enough to back away from.
I would like them to work the way it says in the Constitution, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". In other words, and excellent way for copyright to work is to temporarily restrict copying of new works, thus providing economic incentives for more new works to be published in the first place and enriching the public domain in the long run.
Bad ways for copyright laws to work include:
Or, as in the CHI cases, bad ways for copyright law to be used include:
And finally, even those of us who see this as "gagging" don't necessarily see the solution to be "fix copyright law". Fair use, in particular, is a tricky thing to legislate in advance and a tricky thing for a court to decide. In some cases, such as this one in my opinion, a better fix isn't to have the law on our side, but to have the public on our side. Note that even the Mormons posting here are disappointed by their church's action; hopefully that kind of backlash can lead to these legal demands being withdrawn due to persuasion, without the need for litigation.
So if you want to report about some weird/dangerous,/ridiculous issues in this book, provide a write-up (your own words of what is in there: legal) and support it with facsimiles of excerpts of the original (small parts: legal).
What would be the problem with that?
In the case of religious censorship, you just need to check out the apologetics to see the problem. Paraphrases and commentaries get dismissed as "persecution" and "lies"; small facsimiles are accused of being "taken out of context". Sometimes you really need to give people all the information available before you can get past all the walls trying to obscure it.
I hope the Church's spiritual leadership is swift to address what was likely a foolish bureaucratic decision.
;-)
If they were "swift" to conclude that this decision was foolish, they would have come to that conclusion back in 1999.
Kudos on your theory, though. "This is wrong, so it must not be my church's real policy", even if it's not always correct, is still much more morally sound than "This is my church's real policy, so it must not be wrong". There's a third alternative which is both logically and morally sound, but it conflicts with a premise that you might find it hard to drop first.
Look at the priority the user requested for that packet, check to make sure the router you received the packet from hasn't filled their quota for that priority, and if not, give the packet that priority.
Remember when the internet was supposed to be a "dumb" network that could therefore be easily and seamlessly improved by just improving the software at the endpoints? Those were good times.
There are lots of people who follow wacky religious leaders without getting their doors kicked in. You're even allowed to venerate "rapist" religious leaders instead of just "wacky" ones, like the most recent Texas cult did, and you can still get away with it. It's when your compound moves from "venerating" to "emulating" a rapist leader that you can expect the authorities to come knocking.
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Is Card describing his August 1977 novelette "Ender's Game" or the May 1977 movie "Star Wars"?
The White House's failure to follow records retention laws was due to deficiencies in Microsoft software?
I predict this will lead to a civil, thoughtful Slashdot discussion which results in many useful recommendations for avoiding similar problems in the future.
I recommend fire.
And no, "corporate shell gets disassembled by cheated creditors while the criminals in charge of it get away" is not a happy ending. That's an improvement over the ridiculous threats they were making to scare off Linux interest and lure in Microsoft "investment" money, but a real happy ending for the SCO scammers would involve more pitchforks and fire.
Actually, your analogy of tap water vs. bottled water hits the nail right on the head. it may just be the best analogy I've heard yet on the issue.
I was comparing tap water (lowest common denominator service to everyone) vs. filtered water (a few extra bucks a months for a significant improvement in quality), but bringing bottled water into the picture (a slight improvement in quality and convenience for a huge increase in price) does have some ramifications for health care: who decides how much expense is too much? I think that water filters are worth the cost but bottled water usually isn't. But, obviously lots of people drink unfiltered tap water, lots more buy generic or name brand bottled water, some even buy "designer" bottled water... who is to say which of us is right? With capitalism, we're all right, because we all get to make our own decisions about how much of our own money to spend. But when we're deciding how much of everyone's socialized money to spend, it's impossible to find some compromise that everyone can be happy with.
I mean, in any western developed country, it's hard to justify a system where somebody might die 'cause they can't afford chemotherapy or something, and that the status quo isn't really acceptable.
It's hard with that particular example; chemotherapy is pretty tried and true by now, and a cancer diagnosis is nothing to sneeze at. But would you like to pay to check out every single blemish I might want removed? Or would you agree with me that, while skin cancer is nothing to laugh about, most moles aren't malignant melanoma, and in the absence of suspicious changes or color it's not worth getting every mole on everyone's skin removed and biopsied? We're talking about a potentially life-or-death situation, but I'd still rather be able to make my own choice about where the tradeoffs lie between the risk of terminal cancer and the cost of unnecessary medical service. Insurance already removes much of that choice from the hands of the people most concerned with the consequences, but universal health care would remove even more.
One other thought: I think emergency care isn't really the sticky point, you probably won't get turned away if you show up at an emergency room with a gunshot wound.
Ah, but that depends on the emergency room being open when you show up in the first place. We like to think that we can prevent bad situations with "no refusal of service" sorts of laws, but just like the real minimum wage is a constant "zero dollars per hour", the real number of patients that an emergency room is allowed to turn away for non-payment is "all of them". Emergency room closures tend to get blamed on "illegal immigrants" lately, but the free-rider problem is there no matter where the people who can't or won't pay come from. With normal medical care the patient has time to shop around and the hospitals have the freedom to decide whom to treat, but when there's no time to choose a transaction then there's no way for the free market to work. The best you can do is hope that luck, human decency, or regulation will prevent one party from taking advantage of the other.
It's the chronic or more long-term care (think MS, IBS, diabetes, etc).
Within the limits of current medical science, chronic disease treatment wouldn't be as much of a problem if health insurance acted like, well, insurance. When my friend's car wrecked, her insurance company didn't just pay for a limited time lease and bump up her premiums to match, they covered the whole value so she could buy a replacement. If you're first diagnosed with a chronic illness while you're with insurance company X, an analogous service would be for them to assume the obligation of long-term care for that illness, whether or not you keep that company's coverage for other health risks. Insurance is supposed to be "inverse gambling" for the customer; too often health insurance seems to work more along the lines of "you still assume the same risks, but the insurer gets a cut off the top".
Your municipal tap water is "socialized", but it works pretty well, I think.
Not nearly as well as after the water's gone through the products of a capitalistic filter company, it doesn't.
But how about a compromise: can we socialize health care in the same way we socialize that tap water? In other words, can we socialize it on a municipality-by-municipality basis? That would get rid of the flaws inherent in raw capitalism for emergency care, but without having to subordinate every involved health care decision to a national bureaucracy. Even if "city by city" is too small a scale for visionaries to bother with, more liberal states like California or New York could pass a universal health care law without the massive fighting that's necessary to push something like that through at a federal level. Why haven't they? If they all do it right, then that will be a compelling argument for other states to follow. If some of them succeed and some of them fail then we can learn from the differences between them. And if all of them fail then at least it will be a more limited mistake.
How can you ethically justify having people die because they can't afford treatment?
How can you? You're spending time posting on Slashdot instead of working more hours to earn money for charity, aren't you? And that's a matter of not wanting to give away more of *your own* time and money; imagine how much easier it is to ethically justify a decision not to give away *other people's* time and money.
Please don't get holier-than-thou about what's already inevitably a touchy subject. The question is about what works best, not what's ethically unassailable. Even the proponents of "universal" health care think so, or they wouldn't interpret "universal" to mean "only people who live in the same country as us".
Who's going to bother listening to my "back in my day, we programmed uphill in the snow both ways" stories when I don't even bother to use a monospaced font!
And before I started up my 80x25 terminal window, I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.
Yeah. Much better.
For that reason, the news companies keep their reporters in check and fire those that do any true investigation. Look what happened to Peter Arnett.
I went to that Wikipedia link expecting to be reminded that Arnett had been fired for criticizing the current Iraq War, and yup, no big surprise, he said something mildly critical on Iraq TV and he got fired for it.
Then I read on, to the section where his daughter "Elsa married conservative law professor John Yoo."
Holy crap. Getting fired for criticizing Bush's War, that's one thing... but having Mr. Torture Memos marry your daughter? The Godfather was a freaking amateur; as punishments/threats go, this blows "severed horse's head in your bed" out of the water!
How can something be "semi"-airtight? Does this mean that if you plug it in and drop it into the bathtub with you, you'll only end up semi-dead?
But just give it a chance! I hear the new Maginot-brand routers are great.
And even though you're rarely searching for something you've seen before, it's possible that knowledge of what you have seen before might still be used to put your searches into a better context.
If you're a parent planning to remodel your daughter's bathroom, for example: even though this may be the first time you've ever searched for fixtures with gender-specific decorations for children, a search engine that knows a bit about your demographics could probably give MUCH better results when you type in "tub girl".
Of course, if you try to do so, it's going to cost you. Even though a station wagon might be a less polluting and equally useful alternative to an SUV for many people, it turns out that some hamfisted regulator thought it would be a good idea to control pollution by applying stricter (albeit fleet averaged) emissions and fuel economy standards to "cars" without crippling the economy by applying the same standards to "trucks". Unfortunately (and not coincidentally), the people who are dumb enough to think they can successfully micromanage the world in this fashion are rarely smart enough to anticipate the unintended consequences of their edicts, such as the many families who wanted more cargo or towing capacity than the non-penalized "cars" would provide and who would therefore choose the loophole of buying an SUV "truck" instead.
Oops.
And stunningly enough, people don't seem to learn from these failures. You'd think that, at the very least, experiences like East vs West Germany or North vs South Korea might cause would-be regulators to be extra-careful about starting their own labyrinths of central planning, but I suppose some people never learn. Ideas like emissions taxation should make lovers of both freedom and the environment happy, but there may be other psychology at work here. Why would anyone with a fetish for controlling others be content to merely penalize people proportionately to the costs of the externalities they create? That just *influences* their decisions, which must not be nearly as satisfying as the hope of *eliminating* their decisions. Imagine being in a position to divvy up the world into categories while deciding "this category may pollute this much with no consequences, but not a kilogram more; that category may pollute that much; and if your think your category's allotment is unfair then you'd better find a good loophole or a good lobbyist to help you with that". It must be like playing SimCity but with real human lives.
The idea that the only allowable options for controlling ecological harm are a dichotomy of "regulatory bans" vs "unlimited extravagance" is an idea which only you believe in here; if you're making fun of it then you're only making fun of yourself.
Don't you remember, just a few posts ago, when someone suggested a decentralized way of discouraging unnecessarily excessive environmental harm which nevertheless allows individuals the freedom to make the tradeoffs between the environmental impacts and the benefits of things like LCDs and SUVs? You haven't actually addressed that suggestion, you just started throwing around insults and offering contrary ideas that are so ridiculous that even you yourself can't help but satirize the false dichotomy.
When your criticisms are so stupid that even you can't help but laugh at them, perhaps it's time to stop trying to dominate the discussion and start trying to learn from it.
I mean, if this hypothetical complete idiot was literate then he would have noticed that the discussion topic was climate change, right? But I suppose the idea of a literate complete idiot is a contradiction in terms. But hey, CO2 might indeed lead to species extinction, so clearly attempting to economically limit it via taxation is a stupid idea compared to banning CO2 emissions entirely. You hold your breath first. Let us all know how that goes.
Oh, but please don't let us know via the internet. Since you brought up the topic, you should know that computer and monitor you're using contains toxic heavy metals, and even if you're good about having them reclaimed you don't have a hope of influencing what happens to your ISP's hardware. Since even the smallest amount of groundwater poisoning is 100% intolerable, you wouldn't want to look like a hypocrite by helping to promote it.
Comcast is trying to stop SYN flooding just like many others stated in this thread.
So they're hoping that SYN flooders have all added a default --quit_on_rst_for_some_strange_reason option to their scripts? Of course not. Perhaps "Comcast is trying to block P2P and accidentally blocked HTTP in some cases" isn't the only possible theory, but at least it's a plausible one.