Sure. He only had to open the box, solder a bunch of connection points, insert a switch to cause deliberate hardware faults...
Yeesh. You must be drinking the Sony kool-aid. Look up what Geohot's "crack" to the hypervisor was, it's a joke. Nobody would ever seriously use that for anything.
Firstly, just to state the obvious: I know that most people using these hacks will be running pirated games, and only the tiniest number will be using homebrew software.
Says you. Honestly, I've bought maybe 5 games over the life of my PS3. Most of what I want I can get on the 360, which has MUCH better support for online play and DLC management. The "platform exclusives" for the PS3 have been uniformly disappointing.
The only reason I bought Soul Calibur IV for the PS3 instead of 360 was that at the time, there wasn't a way to hook my arcade sticks up to the 360. Now there is, so if I had it to do again, I'd have bought the 360 version. May still swap out, since I can get it cheap at gamestop now.
I'll be jailbreaking my PS3 to use it as a media center frontend. Maybe I'll play around with some of the homebrew apps/games as well.
They shouldn't be able to "confiscate" all of my legally-bought games as punishment, which is effectively what they're going to do.
So talk to your elected representatives. Oh, that's right, they've all been bought off by corporations, they don't really represent you at all or we never would have had this DMCA crap in the first place.
I yanked the cable from my PS3 months ago. Until such point as I have OtherOS/AsbestOS or something else to run a media center frontend on, it doesn't need a network connection.
I'll probably have to block the thing from going outside my home network via a filter on the router anyways if I ever plug it back in, since at that point the PS3 will be "modded" to run linux. Sigh.
Of course, you wouldn't believe how many of these fucking PS3 games nag, nag, nag about "would you like to connect to PSN? please connect to PSN! I can't go online if you don't connect to PSN! You can't use the online features because you're not on PSN! For the love of god I have to be connected to PSN at all times or I'll die!"... it's really fucking ridiculous. I'm loading up a single player game, my PS3 doesn't have a network connection, for the love of god if there isn't an active connection the game should not pop up 5 or 6 fucking nag screens telling me I should "go online" when all I fucking want to do is play the single-player game.
Eh. Sony's not getting any of my money through PSN, then. And if I want to get a game via download, chances are I can get it on my 360 with little to no trouble. If I have any inkling that a game's going to be "incomplete without the DLC" and I really want the game anyways... see the 360.
It makes it that much more likely that Sony are going to go hardcore against even the Linux developers (like AsbestOS) for the PS3, because one has to "jailbreak" their PS3 in order to install the new linux flavors, and it'll take a custom firmware to restore OtherOS-style installation support.
Personally, I've been waiting for a long while for this. I'd love to install a true media station (XBMC port or something similar) on my PS3 and retire the existing media center frontend in my living room. But up until recently, I had the choice of OtherOS (which had crapass video drivers because Sony didn't want to give people actual hardware access) OR being able to play recently purchased games.
Sony could do much better working WITH the community on things like OtherOS. Instead, they've gone down the paranoid conspiracy-theorist route and look what it's gotten them - now the "pirate" scene and the homebrew scene (not always 100% separated anyways) are working on similar projects to open up the box for non-Sony code.
Precisely. Which is why the MafiAA, who employ illegal tactics, have been caught numerous times engaging in "investigation" using unlicensed personnel who have tainted evidence, have been caught fabricating evidence, have been caught persecuting people that they knew, or should have known had they done anything resembling due diligence, to be innocent (to wit: EXTORTION), and who have been caught on a regular basis defrauding the artists they claim to "represent" not to mention cooking the books to try to claim that movies/albums/etc "lose money", ought to be forcibly disbanded by the courts.
I think you all are making the mistake of thinking that what politicians say out of their ass while behind a podium has anything at all to do with what they are really up to...
Welcome to "modern DRM", also known as "Broken By Design."
Buy a console video game on disc... but then there's the 0-day "DLC" associated, the "DLC Expansion" the month later because the developers were too damn lazy to finish the game before ship date. 5 years from now, nobody will have a complete copy unless the game's lucky to get a "game of the year edition" release, because all the consoles will have broken and the DLC authorization server will be turned off.
Don't believe me? Take a look at Halo 2 right now. Want to set up a LAN party? Hope you're willing to bring in 3-4 original Xboxes, better hope they're all softmodded, hope someone has the custom installer for all the DLC maps preserved somewhere, and pray one of them doesn't die on you while you play.
Ebooks? The goal of the publishers is, and has always been, to try to figure out ways to stop lending and resale. They hate, hate - with a passion - companies like Half Price Books that buy and sell used books. They hate, with a passion, the public library system.
And what they really don't understand is how stupid it makes them look. The "pirates" do the world a huge favor by crafting no-CD hacks, by coming up with ways for people to back up their discs and still play the game, with the original tucked safely away where a dog with chewing issues or a small child can't reach it to destroy it. They give people a way to back up - without having to trust in "authorization servers", without having to hope for a working net connection - downloaded package files for DLC content.
And what's sad is it didn't have to be this way. They could have included a way for us to back up our DLC packages on the consoles. They could sell the games without the ridiculous DRM crap and DVD drive being used as a fucking 5 1/4" dongle. But no. Instead, they treat the customers as criminals and drive them right into the hands of the "pirates."
It is odd that they keep coming back. Unless you live in a really super LDS area they tend to have to much area to come back every 3 months. It could happen because every three months you get in your new batch. If you live in Provo Utah well there is only so many people that are not members. It isn't anything formal but I do find it odd they keep coming back.
In every area I've lived in - and I've moved a few times in my life - the LDS "missionaries" have behaved the same way. So on this point I, following the observations of Mormon Missionary Behavior that I have made thus far, must call you either clueless or a liar. I suspect you are one of the Mormons who never went on "Missionary work" and that you simply have been told something untrue (among the many untruths they have doubtless told you) by your church administration/elders.
Keep in mind that it is possible to lie through ignorance. You may well believe that "all it should take" to get the LDS missionaries to stop annoying people in my area at dinnertime would be to politely tell them to come back, but the reality is that your belief is factually wrong in this regard.
The problem at this point is that you still insist on being rude and insulting. You keep using derogatory terms like Sheeple.
You are correct that the term Sheeple has taken on a derogatory meaning. However, it is an accurate meaning. I do not just use it for the religious, but for any group of human beings who follow "leaders" in a cultlike trance. Followers of various Hollyweird celebrities, Scientologists, unquestioning members of other cults/religions, political wonks whose adherence to their political party is divorced from independent or rational thought... the list is quite extensive.
The rest of your statements are at best generalizations. Many scientists are members of the LDS church as are many engineers and computer scientists.
That does not preclude their inability to confront metaphysical conundrums and philosophical conundrums in anything other than a "but da big shiny god-thing said so through the prophet durr" mode.
I could go on and try to explain that freedom of choice is a vital part of LDS theology but since you choose to keep using negative terms I know that it isn't worth the effort.
Hardly. Baptism by Proxy is "freedom of choice"? Even after lawsuits from groups such as Jewish holocaust survivors and Amerindian tribes, the Mormon Church continues to do this.
The concept of predestination/"foreordination" necessarily negates the illusion of freedom of choice. If one is not a "foreordained elect", then nothing one can do will change this. If one is a "foreordained elect", then this is also unchangeable. Mormons sometimes claim that "choosing to sin" is evidence that one is not foreordained - but that then means that the non-foreordained are the only ones given freedom of choice, except that their choice is essentially meaningless since they are not "elect" by foreordination.
Don't get me wrong - I believe that people should be kind and be the best they can be. But I don't need the metaphysical eye of a big-brother deity and unspecified holy wrath to tell me to do it. I'm evolved enough to see that being good to others ought to be done for its own sake, whether some old troll calling itself a "god" tells people to or not.
Marketing wants what marketing wants. To hell if it has a positive cost/benefit ratio. "Nice and shiny and uses lots of Flash... and runs on my iPhone... drool"
I'm reminded of a branching decision diagram I once saw labeled "thought process of a marketing person." It basically was a "is it shiny" question box with an endless loop if "Yes."
Ops/Security is handed a dogs breakfast of non-working, insecure code that produces amiguous, and often wrong results. Last to find out or provide input. But it's our fault when it doesn't work, or opens all security doors, or breaches laws in several countries. (The last ones to touch it must have broken it).
No kidding. It's not just this way in programming security either - I've got friends who work in hospital security who have a devil of a time with people leaving their passwords and usernames on sticky-notes everywhere. Building security has problems with assholes defeating the building's fire alarm so they can sneak out to a fire escape (or worse yet, a ground-floor alley) and smoke and get back in.
We really would be better off as a species if we could issue summary sterilizations for the "but what's the big deal" crowd so that they'd stop breeding stupid into the next generation.
Actually Missionaries almost are never out knocking doors at dinner time. It would be odd for one to be there at dinner time.
Strange. Every year when they come around, the new crop hits my neighborhood between 5 and 7 pm. Standard Mormon Missionary dress, packing Books of Mormon to give away, pamphlets, the works.
It's the Jehovah's Witnesses who show up at 11AM. Which has led to some interesting deals when some well-meaning neighbors reported our local black JW's to the cops fearing that they were casing houses to find out who was in or out (our city, sadly, has had a problem with a burglary ring consisting mostly of Guatemalan illegal immigrants).
To not be bothered by them again it is simple. Answer the door and say this. Thank you but I am really not interested. They will mark your address as not interested and will not bother you again.
They've been told that. They keep coming, about every 3 months a new crop. You're either a liar or just clueless.
Sorry if you feel that way about us as a whole. I would not classify my self as gullible or sheeple. I doubt that if you knew me you would feel that way about me as well. You see I am the guy that a friend from another church invited to a lecture on creationism because I was good at science. I was also the guy that stood up in the lecture during the QnA and told him where he was wrong.
I have no -personal- problems with Mormons. Most of them I have met have been very polite, nice people. They can tend to be easier to get along with than, say, the no-fun (e.g. "no dancing, no alcohol, no fun of any sort") Baptists that pervade my locality.
The irony is that religion doesn't end with people developing rational thinking skills. The more religious someone is, the more stunted their mental growth, because they never get past the "it is because the authority figure says it is" state of thinking. And when you get to Islam, especially the really crazy shit and the "hate what allah hates" crap preached all over the middle east, it's truly frightening.
I know I will get really flamed for this but those groups you call Fundamentalist Mormons are not Fundamentalist at all. If anything they are actually really breaking several of the fundamentalist rules of the church. They are more radical offshoots of Mormonism. And yes I am a practicing Mormon so let the flames start.
I have nothing serious against Mormonism. I wish you'd grow up about all the fucking tribalism, and I really wish you'd stop the practice of sending your kids all over the world to annoy the piss out of people trying to show them your fairy-tale book during dinnertime, but other than that, I wish more families were as tight-knit as most Mormons I've known, so apparently something there is working in some regard.
That being said - no, they are not "radical offshoots of Mormonism." The various polygamist communities that get called "Fundamentalist Mormons" are precisely what you get when a church has a religious doctrine split, quite similar to the split in the Anglican church when a bunch of congregations ran back to Catholicism on the announcement that the Anglicans were going to ordain women priests (for the record, I think the Catholics have their heads up their asses on this one, and on the whole celibate-priesthood thing too).
You can say they're the result of a doctrinal split, but to call them a "radical offshoot" is disingenuous. They split off because they didn't like a supposed "revelation" (from the "Continuing Revelations", a.k.a. "the book of making this shit up as we go along") by LDS President Wilford Woodruff in 1890.
The odd thing is if you compare the Mormon "prophets" like Smith, Woodruff, Young to other so-called "prophets" like Mohammed and Brian David Mitchell, or if you go back to a large number of "prophets" of other religions/cults (judeo-christian or otherwise), you find out that usually, these "revelations" are just someone making shit up and saying "do it because the cult deity says so." In other words, religion is just another way for crappy, charismatic people to control gullible sheeple.
There are places that one can't go with short-shorts on. And I've definitely been kicked out of restaurants for wearing a tank top.
If you tried to walk into a suit-and-tie restaurant, I'd rather expect that.
Different social situations call for different levels of attire. If a restaurant wants to portray an image of being more upscale, you can bet they're going to have some form of a dress code posted. I doubt it has anything to do with religion.
There are new testament passages that certain Christians interpret as meaning that women should never wear jewelry or makeup.
Paul swore in the new testament that women had to wear head coverings while praying, which you see more often in South American Catholic communities.
Which may have little to nothing to do with christianity - Greek and Roman and Jewish cultures at the time all prescribed head coverings for women, especially in religious events.
And let's not get started on Catholic School dress requirements.
Or the Japanese uniforms? Or are you referring to Rule 34 fetishizations? Seems that school uniforms are rather ubiquitous - and downright similar - throughout the world. As if the arguments had been gone round and round quite a few times...
Although popularly associated with Ireland, there is nothing distinctly Irish or Roman Catholic about them, indeed a number of the asylums, including the first in Ireland, were founded and run by members of Protestant denominations.
You didn't even read your own fucking link, did you?
Pretty much every Western culture requires women to cover their breasts while men can leave theirs bare. I'm not sure of the anthropological history of this particular example, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had Judeo-Christian roots. All cultures have screwy social norms. Most members of that culture can't recognize them.
Yeah seriously, check out what the Chinese used to do to girls.
If you want REALLY weird, check out the Mormons and their Magic Underwear. These freaks also practice "baptism by proxy", wherein they "baptize" dead people using a "stand-in" so that every "family member of a Mormon" gets a "Mormon Baptism"... turns out every few years, some German Mormon nutter gets it into their head to baptize Hitler, then they excommunicate him, then the cycle repeats.
Jehovah's Witnesses believe that "consumption, storage, and transfusion" of blood is 100% verboten. They won't even pre-donate their own blood if they have to go in for a surgery where there may be extra blood needed.
As for the whole deal about cultures and what they will sexualize... I hereby direct you to Rule 34. Or Rule 34. Or Rule 34. Rule 34. In other words, Rule 34.
From the fact that leaving certain bodily parts uncovered at all times is unhygenic (e.g. "No shirt, no shoes, no service"... and they don't mention shorts/underwear only because someone walking around with that part uncovered would violate indecent exposure law anyways).
From the fact that we'd prefer that most of the population not to expose certain things at certain times (let's face it, some of the people who walk around in spandex... ewww).
And then of course, it's not just "Christian" religions that do this kind of thing. Take a look over at Japan if you will.
Of course, the Japanese didn't have a hang-up about boobs the way the Xtians do. Then again, when you get to anthropological study, you can determine that a society covers up what it considers "indecent." You were busy attacking christians, when female genital mutilation is amazingly common in Muslim society. And there can be NO purpose for the Burkha other than to dehumanize women by making them "unseen" in society.
Or maybe we should be a little clearer:
A Burqa is a tool for dehumanizing the wearer. For making it difficult for them to have any individual interaction outside the home. This is not a bug, this is a feature. It depersonalizes women who wear it. It makes it difficult for them to work outside the home, to have a conversation with a stranger or to even be seen as an individual. And again, that is the entire point. Burqas are the product of a culture and religion in which women are not supposed to have any function outside the home. In which they are supposed to remain in Purdah, walled off inside the home.
Not really. Part of the downfall of Damascus Steel is historical notation that even the "masters" who produced it would produce humongous lots of the stuff, and then only send forward the ones that tested to actually have the qualities they were looking for. They re-smelted the rest into normal steel.
Then, of course, Damascus steel was produced using wootz from India, which caused a major problem when the trade routes were interrupted, and also ceased to work properly with different loads of ore. It's entirely possible that we couldn't even make Damascus Steel today even if we had the technique simply because we no longer have ore with the proper impurities to cause the fluke - those ran out around the 1700s.
Vastly overblown, really. We produce far superior steel today (in terms of strength and ability to hold a fine edge).
"If we eliminated IP law, innovation would continue, but information sharing would largely disappear. New discoveries would simply be kept secret."
And this would be any different from the "fuck you, you will never manage to use it unless you're also a giant corporation" and "fuck you, good luck seeing anything ever enter the public domain, ever" setup we have now how precisely?
Where it went wrong is when the "big guys" were allowed to pull tricks like patent-slamming and overwhelm the patent office.
That and when the rules were changed so that a corporation, rather than an individual, got to own the patent.
Absurd patents have always existed, but now they're allowed to destroy industries - and not just the software patent. When Wizards of the Coast was granted a patent on card games, for instance, the patent NEVER should have been granted. It's a motherfucking joke.
A copy of Mr. Hoyle's Games Complete, circa THE YEAR 1750, offers every single mechanic WotC's patent describes that could possibly be counted as a nontrivial change. The idea of a "trading card game" in the patent ought to have been invalidated by, to name one early example "The Base Ball Card Game", produced by the Allegheny Card Company in the year 1904.
But some dope-on-a-rope in the patent office, overworked and underbrained, granted the patent to WotC. Sheer lunacy but the patent-slammers prevailed yet again.
And before you say "well but you could sue to have the patent invalidated" - NO. The point is that crap like this should never be granted. Most of the competing CCG-makers simply folded up shop after WotC started demanding royalties. It took until years later for Wizkids to finally offer a lawsuit to try to invalidate WotC's patent, and then it got settled without judgement, meaning WotC can still bully and make asses of themselves on an obviously invalid patent.
"The Congress really wanked away their rights and obligations on the Iraq war."
You could argue that the moment we became involved in the UN and started sending "peacekeeping troops" around the world, we started letting someone other than Congress decide where our troops were going. And then we started getting into "police action" after "police action"... Go back to 1951, long before you were born, and get an education on the silliness of Korea being a "police action" rather than an actual war from the perspective of the US and UN.
And then, of course, the failure to actually prosecute Korea as a real war is part and parcel of the ludicrous situation with mainland Red China today - our largest failure, to prevent the growth of the cancerous regime currently set up in Beijing.
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"Viable crack"?
Sure. He only had to open the box, solder a bunch of connection points, insert a switch to cause deliberate hardware faults...
Yeesh. You must be drinking the Sony kool-aid. Look up what Geohot's "crack" to the hypervisor was, it's a joke. Nobody would ever seriously use that for anything.
Firstly, just to state the obvious: I know that most people using these hacks will be running pirated games, and only the tiniest number will be using homebrew software.
Says you. Honestly, I've bought maybe 5 games over the life of my PS3. Most of what I want I can get on the 360, which has MUCH better support for online play and DLC management. The "platform exclusives" for the PS3 have been uniformly disappointing.
The only reason I bought Soul Calibur IV for the PS3 instead of 360 was that at the time, there wasn't a way to hook my arcade sticks up to the 360. Now there is, so if I had it to do again, I'd have bought the 360 version. May still swap out, since I can get it cheap at gamestop now.
I'll be jailbreaking my PS3 to use it as a media center frontend. Maybe I'll play around with some of the homebrew apps/games as well.
They shouldn't be able to "confiscate" all of my legally-bought games as punishment, which is effectively what they're going to do.
So talk to your elected representatives. Oh, that's right, they've all been bought off by corporations, they don't really represent you at all or we never would have had this DMCA crap in the first place.
I yanked the cable from my PS3 months ago. Until such point as I have OtherOS/AsbestOS or something else to run a media center frontend on, it doesn't need a network connection.
I'll probably have to block the thing from going outside my home network via a filter on the router anyways if I ever plug it back in, since at that point the PS3 will be "modded" to run linux. Sigh.
Of course, you wouldn't believe how many of these fucking PS3 games nag, nag, nag about "would you like to connect to PSN? please connect to PSN! I can't go online if you don't connect to PSN! You can't use the online features because you're not on PSN! For the love of god I have to be connected to PSN at all times or I'll die!"... it's really fucking ridiculous. I'm loading up a single player game, my PS3 doesn't have a network connection, for the love of god if there isn't an active connection the game should not pop up 5 or 6 fucking nag screens telling me I should "go online" when all I fucking want to do is play the single-player game.
Eh. Sony's not getting any of my money through PSN, then. And if I want to get a game via download, chances are I can get it on my 360 with little to no trouble. If I have any inkling that a game's going to be "incomplete without the DLC" and I really want the game anyways... see the 360.
Sony's just shooting themselves in the foot.
It makes it that much more likely that Sony are going to go hardcore against even the Linux developers (like AsbestOS) for the PS3, because one has to "jailbreak" their PS3 in order to install the new linux flavors, and it'll take a custom firmware to restore OtherOS-style installation support.
Personally, I've been waiting for a long while for this. I'd love to install a true media station (XBMC port or something similar) on my PS3 and retire the existing media center frontend in my living room. But up until recently, I had the choice of OtherOS (which had crapass video drivers because Sony didn't want to give people actual hardware access) OR being able to play recently purchased games.
Sony could do much better working WITH the community on things like OtherOS. Instead, they've gone down the paranoid conspiracy-theorist route and look what it's gotten them - now the "pirate" scene and the homebrew scene (not always 100% separated anyways) are working on similar projects to open up the box for non-Sony code.
Openness != Lawlessness
Precisely. Which is why the MafiAA, who employ illegal tactics, have been caught numerous times engaging in "investigation" using unlicensed personnel who have tainted evidence, have been caught fabricating evidence, have been caught persecuting people that they knew, or should have known had they done anything resembling due diligence, to be innocent (to wit: EXTORTION), and who have been caught on a regular basis defrauding the artists they claim to "represent" not to mention cooking the books to try to claim that movies/albums/etc "lose money", ought to be forcibly disbanded by the courts.
I think you all are making the mistake of thinking that what politicians say out of their ass while behind a podium has anything at all to do with what they are really up to...
Welcome to "modern DRM", also known as "Broken By Design."
Buy a console video game on disc... but then there's the 0-day "DLC" associated, the "DLC Expansion" the month later because the developers were too damn lazy to finish the game before ship date. 5 years from now, nobody will have a complete copy unless the game's lucky to get a "game of the year edition" release, because all the consoles will have broken and the DLC authorization server will be turned off.
Don't believe me? Take a look at Halo 2 right now. Want to set up a LAN party? Hope you're willing to bring in 3-4 original Xboxes, better hope they're all softmodded, hope someone has the custom installer for all the DLC maps preserved somewhere, and pray one of them doesn't die on you while you play.
Ebooks? The goal of the publishers is, and has always been, to try to figure out ways to stop lending and resale. They hate, hate - with a passion - companies like Half Price Books that buy and sell used books. They hate, with a passion, the public library system.
And what they really don't understand is how stupid it makes them look. The "pirates" do the world a huge favor by crafting no-CD hacks, by coming up with ways for people to back up their discs and still play the game, with the original tucked safely away where a dog with chewing issues or a small child can't reach it to destroy it. They give people a way to back up - without having to trust in "authorization servers", without having to hope for a working net connection - downloaded package files for DLC content.
And what's sad is it didn't have to be this way. They could have included a way for us to back up our DLC packages on the consoles. They could sell the games without the ridiculous DRM crap and DVD drive being used as a fucking 5 1/4" dongle. But no. Instead, they treat the customers as criminals and drive them right into the hands of the "pirates."
It is odd that they keep coming back. Unless you live in a really super LDS area they tend to have to much area to come back every 3 months. It could happen because every three months you get in your new batch. If you live in Provo Utah well there is only so many people that are not members. It isn't anything formal but I do find it odd they keep coming back.
In every area I've lived in - and I've moved a few times in my life - the LDS "missionaries" have behaved the same way. So on this point I, following the observations of Mormon Missionary Behavior that I have made thus far, must call you either clueless or a liar. I suspect you are one of the Mormons who never went on "Missionary work" and that you simply have been told something untrue (among the many untruths they have doubtless told you) by your church administration/elders.
Keep in mind that it is possible to lie through ignorance. You may well believe that "all it should take" to get the LDS missionaries to stop annoying people in my area at dinnertime would be to politely tell them to come back, but the reality is that your belief is factually wrong in this regard.
The problem at this point is that you still insist on being rude and insulting. You keep using derogatory terms like Sheeple.
You are correct that the term Sheeple has taken on a derogatory meaning. However, it is an accurate meaning. I do not just use it for the religious, but for any group of human beings who follow "leaders" in a cultlike trance. Followers of various Hollyweird celebrities, Scientologists, unquestioning members of other cults/religions, political wonks whose adherence to their political party is divorced from independent or rational thought... the list is quite extensive.
The rest of your statements are at best generalizations. Many scientists are members of the LDS church as are many engineers and computer scientists.
That does not preclude their inability to confront metaphysical conundrums and philosophical conundrums in anything other than a "but da big shiny god-thing said so through the prophet durr" mode.
I could go on and try to explain that freedom of choice is a vital part of LDS theology but since you choose to keep using negative terms I know that it isn't worth the effort.
Hardly. Baptism by Proxy is "freedom of choice"? Even after lawsuits from groups such as Jewish holocaust survivors and Amerindian tribes, the Mormon Church continues to do this.
The concept of predestination/"foreordination" necessarily negates the illusion of freedom of choice. If one is not a "foreordained elect", then nothing one can do will change this. If one is a "foreordained elect", then this is also unchangeable. Mormons sometimes claim that "choosing to sin" is evidence that one is not foreordained - but that then means that the non-foreordained are the only ones given freedom of choice, except that their choice is essentially meaningless since they are not "elect" by foreordination.
Don't get me wrong - I believe that people should be kind and be the best they can be. But I don't need the metaphysical eye of a big-brother deity and unspecified holy wrath to tell me to do it. I'm evolved enough to see that being good to others ought to be done for its own sake, whether some old troll calling itself a "god" tells people to or not.
Marketing wants what marketing wants. To hell if it has a positive cost/benefit ratio. "Nice and shiny and uses lots of Flash ... and runs on my iPhone ... drool"
I'm reminded of a branching decision diagram I once saw labeled "thought process of a marketing person." It basically was a "is it shiny" question box with an endless loop if "Yes."
Ops/Security is handed a dogs breakfast of non-working, insecure code that produces amiguous, and often wrong results. Last to find out or provide input. But it's our fault when it doesn't work, or opens all security doors, or breaches laws in several countries. (The last ones to touch it must have broken it).
No kidding. It's not just this way in programming security either - I've got friends who work in hospital security who have a devil of a time with people leaving their passwords and usernames on sticky-notes everywhere. Building security has problems with assholes defeating the building's fire alarm so they can sneak out to a fire escape (or worse yet, a ground-floor alley) and smoke and get back in.
We really would be better off as a species if we could issue summary sterilizations for the "but what's the big deal" crowd so that they'd stop breeding stupid into the next generation.
Actually Missionaries almost are never out knocking doors at dinner time. It would be odd for one to be there at dinner time.
Strange. Every year when they come around, the new crop hits my neighborhood between 5 and 7 pm. Standard Mormon Missionary dress, packing Books of Mormon to give away, pamphlets, the works.
It's the Jehovah's Witnesses who show up at 11AM. Which has led to some interesting deals when some well-meaning neighbors reported our local black JW's to the cops fearing that they were casing houses to find out who was in or out (our city, sadly, has had a problem with a burglary ring consisting mostly of Guatemalan illegal immigrants).
To not be bothered by them again it is simple. Answer the door and say this. Thank you but I am really not interested. They will mark your address as not interested and will not bother you again.
They've been told that. They keep coming, about every 3 months a new crop. You're either a liar or just clueless.
Sorry if you feel that way about us as a whole. I would not classify my self as gullible or sheeple. I doubt that if you knew me you would feel that way about me as well. You see I am the guy that a friend from another church invited to a lecture on creationism because I was good at science. I was also the guy that stood up in the lecture during the QnA and told him where he was wrong.
I have no -personal- problems with Mormons. Most of them I have met have been very polite, nice people. They can tend to be easier to get along with than, say, the no-fun (e.g. "no dancing, no alcohol, no fun of any sort") Baptists that pervade my locality.
That being said, I find religion itself to be as I described it: for the most part, a method by which control freaks do their best to control the sheeple of the world, under the function of "some intangible parent figure who, who shakes a finger at us from thousands of years ago and says, and says, "Do it... do it and I'll fuckin' spank you."" And yes, I'm aware of the irony of the quote itself, as well as the movie from which it comes.
The irony is that religion doesn't end with people developing rational thinking skills. The more religious someone is, the more stunted their mental growth, because they never get past the "it is because the authority figure says it is" state of thinking. And when you get to Islam, especially the really crazy shit and the "hate what allah hates" crap preached all over the middle east, it's truly frightening.
As far as I know no Christian church will stone you or put you in jail for wearing a mini skirt. If there is then they are wrong as well.
Precisely. As opposed to Muslims, who will let girls burn to death in a building fire rather than let them be seen in public without a burkha.
I know I will get really flamed for this but those groups you call Fundamentalist Mormons are not Fundamentalist at all. If anything they are actually really breaking several of the fundamentalist rules of the church. They are more radical offshoots of Mormonism. And yes I am a practicing Mormon so let the flames start.
I have nothing serious against Mormonism. I wish you'd grow up about all the fucking tribalism, and I really wish you'd stop the practice of sending your kids all over the world to annoy the piss out of people trying to show them your fairy-tale book during dinnertime, but other than that, I wish more families were as tight-knit as most Mormons I've known, so apparently something there is working in some regard.
That being said - no, they are not "radical offshoots of Mormonism." The various polygamist communities that get called "Fundamentalist Mormons" are precisely what you get when a church has a religious doctrine split, quite similar to the split in the Anglican church when a bunch of congregations ran back to Catholicism on the announcement that the Anglicans were going to ordain women priests (for the record, I think the Catholics have their heads up their asses on this one, and on the whole celibate-priesthood thing too).
You can say they're the result of a doctrinal split, but to call them a "radical offshoot" is disingenuous. They split off because they didn't like a supposed "revelation" (from the "Continuing Revelations", a.k.a. "the book of making this shit up as we go along") by LDS President Wilford Woodruff in 1890.
The odd thing is if you compare the Mormon "prophets" like Smith, Woodruff, Young to other so-called "prophets" like Mohammed and Brian David Mitchell, or if you go back to a large number of "prophets" of other religions/cults (judeo-christian or otherwise), you find out that usually, these "revelations" are just someone making shit up and saying "do it because the cult deity says so." In other words, religion is just another way for crappy, charismatic people to control gullible sheeple.
Don't forget their courage! Their rich, tasty courage...
And just because you have an erection doesn't mean you're actually thinking of someone around you (you could be thinking of someone else).
You don't have to be (consciously at least) thinking of anyone at all. Those things have minds of their own.
There are places that one can't go with short-shorts on. And I've definitely been kicked out of restaurants for wearing a tank top.
If you tried to walk into a suit-and-tie restaurant, I'd rather expect that.
Different social situations call for different levels of attire. If a restaurant wants to portray an image of being more upscale, you can bet they're going to have some form of a dress code posted. I doubt it has anything to do with religion.
There are new testament passages that certain Christians interpret as meaning that women should never wear jewelry or makeup.
Reverend Lovejoy: "Y'ever sat down and read this thing? Technically we're not even supposed to go to the bathroom."
Paul swore in the new testament that women had to wear head coverings while praying, which you see more often in South American Catholic communities.
Which may have little to nothing to do with christianity - Greek and Roman and Jewish cultures at the time all prescribed head coverings for women, especially in religious events.
And let's not get started on Catholic School dress requirements.
Or the Japanese uniforms? Or are you referring to Rule 34 fetishizations? Seems that school uniforms are rather ubiquitous - and downright similar - throughout the world. As if the arguments had been gone round and round quite a few times...
Although popularly associated with Ireland, there is nothing distinctly Irish or Roman Catholic about them, indeed a number of the asylums, including the first in Ireland, were founded and run by members of Protestant denominations.
You didn't even read your own fucking link, did you?
Yet even most aboriginal societies have some form of bodily covering - even if it's just loincloths.
Pretty much every Western culture requires women to cover their breasts while men can leave theirs bare. I'm not sure of the anthropological history of this particular example, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had Judeo-Christian roots. All cultures have screwy social norms. Most members of that culture can't recognize them.
Yeah seriously, check out what the Chinese used to do to girls.
If you want REALLY weird, check out the Mormons and their Magic Underwear. These freaks also practice "baptism by proxy", wherein they "baptize" dead people using a "stand-in" so that every "family member of a Mormon" gets a "Mormon Baptism"... turns out every few years, some German Mormon nutter gets it into their head to baptize Hitler, then they excommunicate him, then the cycle repeats.
Jehovah's Witnesses believe that "consumption, storage, and transfusion" of blood is 100% verboten. They won't even pre-donate their own blood if they have to go in for a surgery where there may be extra blood needed.
As for the whole deal about cultures and what they will sexualize... I hereby direct you to Rule 34. Or Rule 34. Or Rule 34. Rule 34. In other words, Rule 34.
Clear?
From the fact that leaving certain bodily parts uncovered at all times is unhygenic (e.g. "No shirt, no shoes, no service"... and they don't mention shorts/underwear only because someone walking around with that part uncovered would violate indecent exposure law anyways).
From the fact that we'd prefer that most of the population not to expose certain things at certain times (let's face it, some of the people who walk around in spandex... ewww).
And then of course, it's not just "Christian" religions that do this kind of thing. Take a look over at Japan if you will.
Of course, the Japanese didn't have a hang-up about boobs the way the Xtians do. Then again, when you get to anthropological study, you can determine that a society covers up what it considers "indecent." You were busy attacking christians, when female genital mutilation is amazingly common in Muslim society. And there can be NO purpose for the Burkha other than to dehumanize women by making them "unseen" in society.
Or maybe we should be a little clearer: A Burqa is a tool for dehumanizing the wearer. For making it difficult for them to have any individual interaction outside the home. This is not a bug, this is a feature. It depersonalizes women who wear it. It makes it difficult for them to work outside the home, to have a conversation with a stranger or to even be seen as an individual. And again, that is the entire point. Burqas are the product of a culture and religion in which women are not supposed to have any function outside the home. In which they are supposed to remain in Purdah, walled off inside the home.
What Christian denomination imposes anything beyond that which is normally covered in our "indecent exposure" laws or a reasonably normal restaurant?
Are you speaking of the Amish or Mennonites? They're stuck in the dark ages just like the Muslims, but at least they aren't violent about it.
Or are you talking about that freakshow cult, the Fundamentalist Mormons?
Not really. Part of the downfall of Damascus Steel is historical notation that even the "masters" who produced it would produce humongous lots of the stuff, and then only send forward the ones that tested to actually have the qualities they were looking for. They re-smelted the rest into normal steel.
Then, of course, Damascus steel was produced using wootz from India, which caused a major problem when the trade routes were interrupted, and also ceased to work properly with different loads of ore. It's entirely possible that we couldn't even make Damascus Steel today even if we had the technique simply because we no longer have ore with the proper impurities to cause the fluke - those ran out around the 1700s.
"See Damascus steel for an example."
Vastly overblown, really. We produce far superior steel today (in terms of strength and ability to hold a fine edge).
"If we eliminated IP law, innovation would continue, but information sharing would largely disappear. New discoveries would simply be kept secret."
And this would be any different from the "fuck you, you will never manage to use it unless you're also a giant corporation" and "fuck you, good luck seeing anything ever enter the public domain, ever" setup we have now how precisely?
Where it went wrong is when the "big guys" were allowed to pull tricks like patent-slamming and overwhelm the patent office.
That and when the rules were changed so that a corporation, rather than an individual, got to own the patent.
Absurd patents have always existed, but now they're allowed to destroy industries - and not just the software patent. When Wizards of the Coast was granted a patent on card games, for instance, the patent NEVER should have been granted. It's a motherfucking joke.
A copy of Mr. Hoyle's Games Complete, circa THE YEAR 1750, offers every single mechanic WotC's patent describes that could possibly be counted as a nontrivial change. The idea of a "trading card game" in the patent ought to have been invalidated by, to name one early example "The Base Ball Card Game", produced by the Allegheny Card Company in the year 1904.
But some dope-on-a-rope in the patent office, overworked and underbrained, granted the patent to WotC. Sheer lunacy but the patent-slammers prevailed yet again.
And before you say "well but you could sue to have the patent invalidated" - NO. The point is that crap like this should never be granted. Most of the competing CCG-makers simply folded up shop after WotC started demanding royalties. It took until years later for Wizkids to finally offer a lawsuit to try to invalidate WotC's patent, and then it got settled without judgement, meaning WotC can still bully and make asses of themselves on an obviously invalid patent.
Funny.
Dumbass Dan Patrick also wants to cut school breakfast and lunch programs for kids whose parents are out of work or in the poorhouse.
Guess you retardicans don't really give a shit about feeding kids, now do you?
"Of course, without strong ip laws there's no reason to innovate."
Really. Interesting - innovation seems to predate "intellectual property law" by at least millenia.
"The Congress really wanked away their rights and obligations on the Iraq war."
You could argue that the moment we became involved in the UN and started sending "peacekeeping troops" around the world, we started letting someone other than Congress decide where our troops were going. And then we started getting into "police action" after "police action"... Go back to 1951, long before you were born, and get an education on the silliness of Korea being a "police action" rather than an actual war from the perspective of the US and UN.
And then, of course, the failure to actually prosecute Korea as a real war is part and parcel of the ludicrous situation with mainland Red China today - our largest failure, to prevent the growth of the cancerous regime currently set up in Beijing.