A handgun has exactly one purpose: to kill people at close range while itself being easily concealable. I don't see how a fear of handguns could be anything but rational, provided the person actually wants to live.
Announcing or brandishing the fact that you have a handgun can only really be interpreted one way: "I can kill you easily." It is at best an effort at intimidation, no different than a martial artist or bodybuilder vocally cataloging the different ways they could kill you, hurt you, or otherwise incapacitate you.
Maybe you are "quiet" about your gun ownership because you don't like having to deal with the reactions you get. Others are quiet because they're not obsessed with their own ability to murder. They're more interested in their shopping list than in how many different ways they could kill the store clerk.
"And no, the hunters are not shooting at the fibre or insulators, but at the pheasant, grouse and other flying game creatures that routinely alight on the overhead cables (usually power lines) that carry the fibre."
And those hunters and their families are going to starve to death if they don't get that particular little bird that happens to be in a Bad Place to Shoot.
"There will always be something that can be explained at the time, and people will fear and respect it and even worship it."
You're assuming that the principle purpose of religion is to explain natural and other physical phenomena. However, the focus of religion is actually on the human condition, and ultimately has more to do with sociology than cosmology.
This guy is a Roman Catholic. The entire creation myth of his religion, from "In the beginning" to Noah's Ark, fills only the first 10 chapters of the 50 chapters of Genesis, one of 41 or so books in his version of the Old Testament, which is only roughly half of his core religious scripture. His Christian denomination, at least, really doesn't care about the realm of the physical sciences as much as you seem to think it does.
That would have required identifying that EZ Texting was the advertising agent, rather than Domains By Proxy (owner of record of all domains used by EZ Texting) or the advertiser themselves.
You accept that the Service is provided for professional use only, and you agree that your use of the Website or Service shall not include (...) (e)ngaging in any other activity that Ez Texting believes could subject it to criminal liability or civil penalty/judgment.
This lone sentence is the sole reference to potential liability of advertisers on EZ Texting's networks. They don't even meet the FCC's minimum legal level of disclosure of potential legal liability, as described in 47 CFR 64.1200(g)(2).
"Blocking a spammer wouldn't create this lawsuit or publicity."
It would if EZ Texting were seeking legal precedent to allow them carte blanche access to mobile phone provider networks, one that allows them to avoid legal obligations and liabilities.
Run by Shane Neman, who also runs "Club Texting," both companies are known for sending out unsolicited text spam, which is illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (because the recipient has to pay to receive the message). When not avoiding disclosure of legal liabilities to their customers, they're quietly lobbying the FCC to get the same odious protections Congress gave junk faxers.
I doubt this is less about the content of the advertising and more about T-Mobile responding to customer complaints and attempting to cut off an unlawful advertiser who's trespassing on their networks. A spammer is a spammer is a spammer.
"That truism is no longer valid; there are whole mathematical systems devoted to uncertainty."
Such fields are necessarily not involved in engineering, however.
"Somebody is right. As a betting man I'ld bet that engineers are correct more times than any other field or endeavor."
Thank you for demonstrating my point. The only time an engineer would be more likely to be correct on an issue is when it is an engineering issue. A grasp of mathematics and mechanics does not make an engineer an expert on political science or theology.
"Hah. Right, this system isn't broke. Sure."
Again, you have demonstrated my point. "The system" is the first place you point the finger, never thinking to ask "Did I just screw up?"
"Engineers don't have interpersonal relationships. They're too busy studying/practicing/building."
You have just demonstrated one of my points for a third time. None of that studying/practicing/building is done in a social vacuum. The whole point of the engineering trade is to study/practice/build something because somebody else wants you to.
"I doubt this highly. Engineers "sense of superiority" is nothing of the sort - they are aware of the limits of their knowledge (which oft times is extensive)."
"Somebody is right. As a betting man I'ld bet that engineers are correct more times than any other field or endeavor." --You, three seconds ago.
"Your complaint seems to be that there are a lot of religions, ie a lot of different religious beliefs."
No, I'm saying that each individual has unique and fluid religious beliefs. I'm not just saying "Jews believe differently from Christians," I'm saying "Two Christians living in the same home believe differently, and what exactly they believe now may not be the same as what exactly they believe five minutes from now."
"That's ok, they can each be tested, one at a time. Is that hard?"
Even if it were possible to understand another human being's religious faith with infinite precision, and even if you were able to agree with that individual on what particular aspects of their faith should be taken literally, and even if you were able to devise a method to falsify it, you're still not guaranteed that what you falsified was something core to their faith, rather than tertiary dogmatic interpretation, an aspect of their faith they can change and still comfortably maintain their core beliefs.
Take, for example, Christianity. They all say "Jesus was the son of Yahweh." To some, that means that divine sperm fertilized Mary's egg, and half of Jesus' DNA is divine. You could falsify that, but you can't falsify those who believe that Jesus' divine parentage was in the sense of "We are all the children of God."
Resurrection? A fundamentalist would believe that Jesus' heart stopped beating and all brain function stopped for a week, then he got up and did more things. Others see it in the same sense as a departed relative "living on in our hearts."
In both of these examples, the two possibilities listed aren't even discrete, and allow unique individual interpretation on a continuum. In each, you can falsify the former option, but for the latter the best you can do is to take the fundamentalist stance and declare that these people aren't "real" Christians, despite what they may say.
"Pretty near any serious religion" doesn't have complete uniformity of belief among believers. Where a religion involves a sacred text, no two believers will always agree on what is literal and what is metaphorical. "Pretty near any serious religion" is riddled with sects and schisms because of such disagreements. Additionally, nothing that qualifies as "pretty near any serious religion," at least if it is a living religion, is completely static. Dogmatic interpretations change with the times, where what was once considered literal has come to be interpreted metaphorically.
So, in order to disprove a religion, unless you're dealing with a cult that unambiguously declares a measurable, verifiable statement to be literal fact (e.g. the world will end at a specific date and time), you have to make a personal judgment that the statement you are attempting to disprove is a literal one.
In other words, you have to believe that it's falsifiable.
Is the goal regime change, or is it to avoid supporting unethical and/or immoral behavior?
In this particular example, is the problem that News is propping up the regime, or that News is profiting off of the reprehensible treatment of North Korean workers?
"Piracy comes first then comes homebrew. Whenever in the history of console gaming has it been that the case where homebrew came first then piracy?"
The PlayStation 3, right on up until they removed the Other OS option.
Piracy is always going to "come first," as you put it, when the first step to running arbitrary code is cracking security. When security needs to be cracked before homebrew programmers are even able to know what they're really dealing with, the only code that will be run while homebrew developers get up to speed is code that already exists: published games.
Piracy is simply the path of least resistance once a crack has been established. It need not be the catalyst for developing the crack to begin with.
Further...
"Piracy drove PS2 homebrew(First modchips played PS2 and PSOne burns)"
In both cases, while there may have been other ways to get sofware into the system, the only firmly established way to get code into the system before a crack was discovered was off of optical media. A console already executes code off of optical media out of the box, that's naturally going to be the first vector to execute arbitrary code, pirated or homebrew, rather than doing the unknown amount of extra work necessary to crack a PS2 to execute code off of USB media, or some cobbled-together serial or parallel cable for the PS1.
ISOs are going to come first because they're the path of least resistance into getting through a console's security.
"this is coming from the piracy arm of the "We want open" crowd."
You're forgetting two things:
Pirates are, as a rule, lazy. The entire point of the endeavor is to avoid having to work to play a game. Someone who isn't going to part with $60 of their paycheck for a legitimate copy isn't then going to turn around and pour hundreds of man-hours into finding a hack.
Catering to pirates is always going to be a race to the bottom. If a hack is primarily based on software/firmware, the same customers who aren't going to respect a game publisher's IP sure as hell aren't going to respect yours. Even if the game publishers don't come after you, you can only sell your crack until someone else cracks your crack. Even where a hack is based on hardware, within a week you'll be competing with just about every chip fabrication shop in China. Either way, you'll be the only one on the market that has to recoup development costs.
So either the original crack was produced by someone with absolutely no business acumen whatsoever, or it was made by someone who enjoyed the necessary work for its own sake and then decided to make a quick buck off his hobby, rather than this being a serious attempt to turn a profit off of pirates. Or perhaps the attempt to cater to pirates was the cracker's attempt to deliberately enrage Sony. Either way, there's really no way to turn a net profit on cracks like this, even before you involve corporate lawyers and/or triads.
Therefore, the most likely source of the original crack is from someone who enjoys working on the PlayStation 3. This brings us to the question "Is this person someone who enjoys coding on the console in general, or someone who focuses on probing the system's security in particular?"
And if it was always about cracking the system's security, why did it "just happen" to take four long years? Why didn't it take three, or five? Why did it "just happen" to closely follow the closing off of other coding opportunities?
Just because the fees aren't up-front doesn't mean they're not ultimately being paid by the end-user. Or hadn't you noticed that PS3 games are consistently $10 more than PC games?
First and foremost, the United Nations is just that, and is inherently biased towards the states that create and support it.
But beyond that, the United Nations was created primarily to put an end to, or at least limit, international conflict, and the UN's commitment to human rights is only a means to that end. The list of human rights that the UN and other international bodies have agreed upon are primarily, if not exclusively, those rights that have been consistently listed as the casus belli of prior international conflicts. These human rights are typically focused on minorities rather than individual rights, as one country's minority is another's majority. So Slavic majorities in Serbia and Russia complained of Austro-Hungarian oppression of Slavic minorities in Croatia, Germany spoke of the plight of Czechoslovakia's German minority, and (far more recently) Russia complained of Georgia's oppression of Ossetians.
Rights of the individual, however, almost never become more than domestic matter, a cause for domestic, not international, conflict (e.g. civil wars, revolutions, etc.). So, ultimately, the UN shouldn't care one way or the other, at least not openly and officially, so long as these rules are applied uniformly and not, say, to Indian Muslims moreso than to Indian Hindus.
"The only legal precedent that was set by the Civil War was that states cannot forcibly secede from the Union."
Texas v. White says they cannot secede unilaterally. Statehood is an act of Congress, and a state cannot unilaterally overturn an act of Congress. The state can ask nicely, or can compel Congress by force of arms, but the deciding factor is Congress' consent (voluntary or otherwise), not the presence violence.
The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.
Slashdot Mirror
"your irrational fear of inanimate objects"
A handgun has exactly one purpose: to kill people at close range while itself being easily concealable. I don't see how a fear of handguns could be anything but rational, provided the person actually wants to live.
Announcing or brandishing the fact that you have a handgun can only really be interpreted one way: "I can kill you easily." It is at best an effort at intimidation, no different than a martial artist or bodybuilder vocally cataloging the different ways they could kill you, hurt you, or otherwise incapacitate you.
Maybe you are "quiet" about your gun ownership because you don't like having to deal with the reactions you get. Others are quiet because they're not obsessed with their own ability to murder. They're more interested in their shopping list than in how many different ways they could kill the store clerk.
"And no, the hunters are not shooting at the fibre or insulators, but at the pheasant, grouse and other flying game creatures that routinely alight on the overhead cables (usually power lines) that carry the fibre."
And those hunters and their families are going to starve to death if they don't get that particular little bird that happens to be in a Bad Place to Shoot.
"There will always be something that can be explained at the time, and people will fear and respect it and even worship it."
You're assuming that the principle purpose of religion is to explain natural and other physical phenomena. However, the focus of religion is actually on the human condition, and ultimately has more to do with sociology than cosmology.
This guy is a Roman Catholic. The entire creation myth of his religion, from "In the beginning" to Noah's Ark, fills only the first 10 chapters of the 50 chapters of Genesis, one of 41 or so books in his version of the Old Testament, which is only roughly half of his core religious scripture. His Christian denomination, at least, really doesn't care about the realm of the physical sciences as much as you seem to think it does.
All "pagan" means is "not Christian."
"T-Mobile should have notified EZ Texting"
That would have required identifying that EZ Texting was the advertising agent, rather than Domains By Proxy (owner of record of all domains used by EZ Texting) or the advertiser themselves.
"which are a violation of their terms of service"
These terms?
This lone sentence is the sole reference to potential liability of advertisers on EZ Texting's networks. They don't even meet the FCC's minimum legal level of disclosure of potential legal liability, as described in 47 CFR 64.1200(g)(2).
"Blocking a spammer wouldn't create this lawsuit or publicity."
It would if EZ Texting were seeking legal precedent to allow them carte blanche access to mobile phone provider networks, one that allows them to avoid legal obligations and liabilities.
Run by Shane Neman, who also runs "Club Texting," both companies are known for sending out unsolicited text spam, which is illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (because the recipient has to pay to receive the message). When not avoiding disclosure of legal liabilities to their customers, they're quietly lobbying the FCC to get the same odious protections Congress gave junk faxers.
http://www.commlawblog.com/tags/club-texting/
EZ Texting makes sure to send their messages from obfuscated domains with "private" registration information (spammers apparently don't like being spammed, or being served lawsuits).
I doubt this is less about the content of the advertising and more about T-Mobile responding to customer complaints and attempting to cut off an unlawful advertiser who's trespassing on their networks. A spammer is a spammer is a spammer.
"That truism is no longer valid; there are whole mathematical systems devoted to uncertainty."
Such fields are necessarily not involved in engineering, however.
"Somebody is right. As a betting man I'ld bet that engineers are correct more times than any other field or endeavor."
Thank you for demonstrating my point. The only time an engineer would be more likely to be correct on an issue is when it is an engineering issue. A grasp of mathematics and mechanics does not make an engineer an expert on political science or theology.
"Hah. Right, this system isn't broke. Sure."
Again, you have demonstrated my point. "The system" is the first place you point the finger, never thinking to ask "Did I just screw up?"
"Engineers don't have interpersonal relationships. They're too busy studying/practicing/building."
You have just demonstrated one of my points for a third time. None of that studying/practicing/building is done in a social vacuum. The whole point of the engineering trade is to study/practice/build something because somebody else wants you to.
"I doubt this highly. Engineers "sense of superiority" is nothing of the sort - they are aware of the limits of their knowledge (which oft times is extensive)."
"Somebody is right. As a betting man I'ld bet that engineers are correct more times than any other field or endeavor." --You, three seconds ago.
"So are you the engineer or terrorist?"
You missed the last two words of my complete sentence.
But I suppose I'm either with you or against you.
If closed-source is so competent, why does every EULA I ever read disclaim any warranty?
Both have a worldview consisting of strict mathematical certainty, with no room for shades of gray.
Both place little value in opinions or interests that do not align with theirs.
Both are more likely to blame their problems on external factors rather than internal flaws.
Both grossly oversimplify interpersonal relationships.
Both have an innate sense of superiority.
Take a look at the way the OP blames the magazine publisher and at some of the highly rated comments here for examples.
"Buddhism, for example, says that if you follow the 8-fold path, you will be relieved of suffering (reach enlightenment, etc."
Define "suffering" and "enlightenment."
"Various Christians believe different things, but the bible talks about the followers of Christ being able to do miracles."
Define "miracles."
Next he'll try to buy a human liver.
And, as a Briton, he lost any right to come here whenever he wants in 1776.
Part of having your own borders means getting to decide who gets to cross them.
"Your complaint seems to be that there are a lot of religions, ie a lot of different religious beliefs."
No, I'm saying that each individual has unique and fluid religious beliefs. I'm not just saying "Jews believe differently from Christians," I'm saying "Two Christians living in the same home believe differently, and what exactly they believe now may not be the same as what exactly they believe five minutes from now."
"That's ok, they can each be tested, one at a time. Is that hard?"
Even if it were possible to understand another human being's religious faith with infinite precision, and even if you were able to agree with that individual on what particular aspects of their faith should be taken literally, and even if you were able to devise a method to falsify it, you're still not guaranteed that what you falsified was something core to their faith, rather than tertiary dogmatic interpretation, an aspect of their faith they can change and still comfortably maintain their core beliefs.
Take, for example, Christianity. They all say "Jesus was the son of Yahweh." To some, that means that divine sperm fertilized Mary's egg, and half of Jesus' DNA is divine. You could falsify that, but you can't falsify those who believe that Jesus' divine parentage was in the sense of "We are all the children of God."
Resurrection? A fundamentalist would believe that Jesus' heart stopped beating and all brain function stopped for a week, then he got up and did more things. Others see it in the same sense as a departed relative "living on in our hearts."
In both of these examples, the two possibilities listed aren't even discrete, and allow unique individual interpretation on a continuum. In each, you can falsify the former option, but for the latter the best you can do is to take the fundamentalist stance and declare that these people aren't "real" Christians, despite what they may say.
"Pretty near any serious religion" doesn't have complete uniformity of belief among believers. Where a religion involves a sacred text, no two believers will always agree on what is literal and what is metaphorical. "Pretty near any serious religion" is riddled with sects and schisms because of such disagreements. Additionally, nothing that qualifies as "pretty near any serious religion," at least if it is a living religion, is completely static. Dogmatic interpretations change with the times, where what was once considered literal has come to be interpreted metaphorically.
So, in order to disprove a religion, unless you're dealing with a cult that unambiguously declares a measurable, verifiable statement to be literal fact (e.g. the world will end at a specific date and time), you have to make a personal judgment that the statement you are attempting to disprove is a literal one.
In other words, you have to believe that it's falsifiable.
"burning religious books is no big deal and people need to get over it."
If it's "no big deal," there was no reason to do it to begin with. There are cheaper ways to get rolling paper.
Rather, to him it is a big deal: it's a pulpit on which to stand and say "It's no big deal."
I can falsify a stationary earth. The only religion you can falsify is the one you define to be falsifiable.
Is the goal regime change, or is it to avoid supporting unethical and/or immoral behavior?
In this particular example, is the problem that News is propping up the regime, or that News is profiting off of the reprehensible treatment of North Korean workers?
"Piracy comes first then comes homebrew. Whenever in the history of console gaming has it been that the case where homebrew came first then piracy?"
The PlayStation 3, right on up until they removed the Other OS option.
Piracy is always going to "come first," as you put it, when the first step to running arbitrary code is cracking security. When security needs to be cracked before homebrew programmers are even able to know what they're really dealing with, the only code that will be run while homebrew developers get up to speed is code that already exists: published games.
Piracy is simply the path of least resistance once a crack has been established. It need not be the catalyst for developing the crack to begin with.
Further...
"Piracy drove PS2 homebrew(First modchips played PS2 and PSOne burns)"
In both cases, while there may have been other ways to get sofware into the system, the only firmly established way to get code into the system before a crack was discovered was off of optical media. A console already executes code off of optical media out of the box, that's naturally going to be the first vector to execute arbitrary code, pirated or homebrew, rather than doing the unknown amount of extra work necessary to crack a PS2 to execute code off of USB media, or some cobbled-together serial or parallel cable for the PS1.
ISOs are going to come first because they're the path of least resistance into getting through a console's security.
"this is coming from the piracy arm of the "We want open" crowd."
You're forgetting two things:
So either the original crack was produced by someone with absolutely no business acumen whatsoever, or it was made by someone who enjoyed the necessary work for its own sake and then decided to make a quick buck off his hobby, rather than this being a serious attempt to turn a profit off of pirates. Or perhaps the attempt to cater to pirates was the cracker's attempt to deliberately enrage Sony. Either way, there's really no way to turn a net profit on cracks like this, even before you involve corporate lawyers and/or triads.
Therefore, the most likely source of the original crack is from someone who enjoys working on the PlayStation 3. This brings us to the question "Is this person someone who enjoys coding on the console in general, or someone who focuses on probing the system's security in particular?"
And if it was always about cracking the system's security, why did it "just happen" to take four long years? Why didn't it take three, or five? Why did it "just happen" to closely follow the closing off of other coding opportunities?
Two words: licensing fees.
Just because the fees aren't up-front doesn't mean they're not ultimately being paid by the end-user. Or hadn't you noticed that PS3 games are consistently $10 more than PC games?
"California is a Right to Work State,"
So Hurd doesn't have to pay union dues?
What's the problem? Google keeps on raking pages from Wikipedia higher than Conservapedia? I agree, that must be an anti-competitive conspiracy!
First and foremost, the United Nations is just that, and is inherently biased towards the states that create and support it.
But beyond that, the United Nations was created primarily to put an end to, or at least limit, international conflict, and the UN's commitment to human rights is only a means to that end. The list of human rights that the UN and other international bodies have agreed upon are primarily, if not exclusively, those rights that have been consistently listed as the casus belli of prior international conflicts. These human rights are typically focused on minorities rather than individual rights, as one country's minority is another's majority. So Slavic majorities in Serbia and Russia complained of Austro-Hungarian oppression of Slavic minorities in Croatia, Germany spoke of the plight of Czechoslovakia's German minority, and (far more recently) Russia complained of Georgia's oppression of Ossetians.
Rights of the individual, however, almost never become more than domestic matter, a cause for domestic, not international, conflict (e.g. civil wars, revolutions, etc.). So, ultimately, the UN shouldn't care one way or the other, at least not openly and officially, so long as these rules are applied uniformly and not, say, to Indian Muslims moreso than to Indian Hindus.
"The only legal precedent that was set by the Civil War was that states cannot forcibly secede from the Union."
Texas v. White says they cannot secede unilaterally. Statehood is an act of Congress, and a state cannot unilaterally overturn an act of Congress. The state can ask nicely, or can compel Congress by force of arms, but the deciding factor is Congress' consent (voluntary or otherwise), not the presence violence.
--Texas v. White