Anytime the death penalty is suggested at all, there's something terribly wrong with the picture. Nobody can logically explain why it's okay to kill someone when it isn't okay to kill someone.
If I grabbed someone off the street and kept them locked up in a small room for 5 years, I'd be a kidnapper, right? So let's try a variation:
Any time prison is suggested at all, there's something terribly wrong with the picture. Nobody can logically explain why it's okay to kidnap someone when it isn't okay to kidnap someone.
The trick is that locking someone up in prison, after they've had a fair trial, isn't kidnapping.
So, same thing with murder. Killing isn't illegal; murder is illegal. Purposeful killing is usually murder, but there are some exceptions. For example, if you kill someone who was about to kill or do grevious bodily injury to you or someone else, it's not murder. Similarly, if a person is directed by the judiciary, after a fair trial, to execute someone, it's not murder either.
The death penalty may be unnecessary, unhelpful, or wrong for some other reason. But if you stick by the argument you make here, we couldn't make any punishment: If the death penalty is murder, then jail is kidnapping, fines are theft.
It is the freakin' Middle East, everybody has guns.
Does everyone have RPGs? Are they legal to own in Iraq? If you look at this clip of the video, you'll see a guy carrying something that looks exactly like an RPG. It's definitely not a camera.
How about the one showing someone carrying something that was definitely not a camera? It looks exactly like an RPG, a weapon which put the gunner's life in immediate danger.
The question I have is, why hasn't everyone seen the blow-up clip with the RPG in it?
The short answer is, that the group, as a whole, was not unarmed. If you look carefully, one of the guys has something that looks exactly like an RPG. It's definitely not a camera. It's a shame that he journalists were killed, but they were walking around in a warzone with people carrying weapons.
What's difficult for me to understand is why everyone who saw the first video hasn't seen the video clip with the RPG in it as well.
The explanation is simple: the group wasn't unarmed. If you look carefully at the video, one of the guys is carrying something that looks exactly like an RPG. Here's a close-up. It's definitely not a camera. So it's a shame that the two photographers were killed, but they were walking around in broad daylight in a warzone with someone slinging a weapon over their shoulder.
People will still need to drive to work. Trucks and trains will still need to run. Airlines will still fly, people will still run their AC, wash their clothes and dishes, watch TV, power their lights, etc.
No, the changing economics will change how people behave. Right now, it's both cheaper and faster for me to take a flight from the UK to just about anywhere in Europe. Same taking a train any distance in the US. So why should I waste my time and money on a train?
But taking an airplane releases a ton more CO2 -- and thus, in reality does cost more, because it damages the environment. It's just that that cost is hidden. So, put the cost into it; make things that damage the environment more expensive, and people will choose less expensive things. If the carbon tax went into play, then taking an airplane from Detroit to Kansas would be 3-4x the cost of taking a train, instead of less. I might still fly to the west coast from the east coast rather than take a 48 hour train ride, but many people wouldn't. There'd be more of a market for high-speed trains, which would make them more economically viable. &c &c.
With driving to work: sure, you're stuck driving to work now because you made your decisions of where to live and what kind of car you have based on different economic conditions; the infrastructure (roads, &c) is build on different economic assumptions, and cultural ideals and aspirations (i.e., a 2-car garage in the suburbs) was built on different economic assumptions. Change the economics permanently, and eventually all of those will change. Your next car will be more fuel efficient. Your next house will be closer to where you work (or your next job will be closer to where you live). Cities will switch from building giant 20-lane superhighways to building more efficient public transit. Developers and city planners will find ways to make nice, high-quality living more densely and efficiently than current suburbia. Cultural aspirations to live in a gigantic new house in a subdivision will change.
We didn't get where we are overnight; we've had 150+ years of the environmental impact of fossil fuels having little to no impact on the economics of their use. It will take a few years for the changed economics to reshape society to be more carbon-efficient. But that's the only way to make long-term change.
While words have power, there's some non-small number of folks who believe that words have intrinsic power. As in, for some reason, a particular combination of sounds has some inherent ability to produce effects.
Bzzt.
Ask the opposite question: What's so good about swearing? Why do people do it? Why does it feel more powerful to say, "What the fuck is wrong with you?" than "What the heck is wrong with you?" Because those words are artifically endowed with power by society. If people didn't consider them "bad", there wouldn't be any particular reason to use them. When you swear, you demonstrate that you do think there's something special about the word, or you wouldn't use it.
If anything, sprinkling in illogical references sexual intercourse, body parts, and religious concepts to artificially increase the power of any sentence seems like "magical thinking" to me.
Apparently some people think certain words are evil, bad and offensive regardless of the context in which they are used.
The irony of this whole thing is that the only point in saying those words is that they are considered "evil, bad, and offensive". The two sentences, "What the heck is wrong with you?" and "What the fuck is wrong with you?" are both exactly the same -- except that the second one has the "evil, bad, and offensive" word. That's the only reason to favor the second one over the first one. If no one thought "fuck" was a "bad word", no one would use it.
College isn't a trade school, you're supposed to get a well-rounded education.
This is part of the problem -- Universities are saying, "We're not helping people get jobs, we're making you a well-rounded individual", but nobody is listening. Everyone else -- from teachers, parents, hiring managers, politicians -- says going to university is a good career move. And there's no particular incentive for Universities to disabuse people of this notion before they've invested $100k to become a "more well-rounded individual".
They end up cutting down trees (or, as in my case, driving a truck) only after they've failed to accomplish that goal.
A lot of people I know in that situation (not necessarily including you in this) didn't actually have a goal in the first place. They went to college and studied what they liked, thinking (perhaps not consciously, but evidenced by their actions) that when they graduated they would be handed a comfortable job on a silver platter. They didn't ask what kind of job they might like to get, and how they could prepare for that. They just took classes they liked: e.g., literary analysis, history, &c. and didn't bother thinking about what they were actually going to do after they graduated, and if they were prepared for it. Many of the people I'm thinking about went to private schools and are therefore under a mountain of debt to boot.
Perhaps they didn't make the wisest choice about what to study but sometimes it's kind of hard to know that in advance
I think a lot of things play into this. Culture says, "a college degree is a way to a better life". As mentioned above, HR managers will require a bachelor's, and sometimes a Master's, for jobs that don't need anywhere near that amount of schooling. Kids are more or less trained in school that if you just do what everyone tells you, check all the tick-boxes, then things will go well for you, and are thus ill-prepared for a world where that's not true. Some people want to be told what to do, and don't have the drive or confidence to to looking for themselves.
And of course, universities sometimes seem oblivious to the fact that what many people think they're buying is a ticket to a better life, not simply a liberal education to make them a more well-rounded thinking individual. Unfortunately, there's no particular incentive for universities to disabuse people of this error.
I wonder if in part our problem is that there are few programs that include elements of both vocational training and liberal education. You either study at university, where you are taught things to expand your horizons but no marketable job skills, or you go to a trade / vocational school, and are taught only job skills but not necessarily a liberal education, to help expand your mind. (Not been to a tech / vocational school, so feel free correct me if I'm wrong here.) The main exception I've seen to this is engineering.
Imagine if there were a 3- or 4-year degree for "smart tradesmen" (think roofers, carpenters, electircians, &c) that included some history, science, literature, &c, a solid foundation in running a business (since these guys are probably sharp enough to be either managers or business owners), in addition to the skills required to actually do the job.
Or, if at universities, you had two required components of your major: one was your "Liberal education focus", one was your "Vocation focus". You could major in history and accounting, or music and restaurant management.
But the question here is whether they can claim copyright on the code he wrote before he was working for them. I think the answer is no; I have a friend who successfully claimed personal ownership of patents that a university wanted dibs on for similar reasons. In that case, the code he wrote while employed by them is owned by them, but can't be distributed (probably even internally -- you are making copies, after all) without putting it under the GPL, unless they hire someone to re-write all the code they don't own.
But of course, the correct answer is always, "Consult a lawyer".
but I think (could be wrong) a lot of the stuff in the new testament was ment to invalidate the old stuff, like stoning.
You have to separate the stuff in the Old Testament was about running a government from the rules meant for personal conduct. Yes, the death penalty was often imposed for many offenses (including murder, adultery, being a lazy bum and mooching off your parents after they've tried to get you go get a real job, collecting wood on Saturday after you'd been told not to). But those were laws about what the government should do, not individual citizens. Many governments still impose the death penalty for some forms of murder. Death for a lot of the other ones seems pretty extreme to us now, but in part that's a cultural difference. Most governments at the time had similarly harsh punishments.
There's no indication in the Old Testament that the laws regarding government were meant to last forever, or that any country other than ancient Israel was meant to live under them. There was a period of history where large numbers of Jews had been forcibly removed from Israel, and the Old Testament tells them specifically to keep following the religious customs, but otherwise follow the law of the land they were in and "seek its good". Most of the New Testament Christians were living under Roman rule outside of Israel, and were told to respect the government of whatever country they were in.
As has been said elsewhere, Islam has no provision for separation of Church and State.
When one is presented with contradictory instructions, one chooses the instruction that fits what one wants to do.
Not if one thinks that there is a real, just God, who is going to hold you accountable at the end of your life for what you've done, and are earnestly trying to find out what He thinks.
As a moderate Christian, I'm glad I don't live in a Christian theocracy as well.
That said, there is a significant difference between the foundation of the two religions. Jesus said "...love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and unjust alike." (From Matthew's biography of Jesus) And Peter, one of his disciples, and a leader in early Christianity, wrote: "God called you to do good, even if it means suffering, just as Christ suffered for you. He is your example, and you must follow in his steps. He never sinned, nor ever deceived anyone. He did not retaliate when he was insulted, nor threaten revenge when he suffered. He left his case in the hands of God, who always judges fairly." (Letter from Peter, one of Jesus' disciples, to early Christians). For a "Christian" nutjob to make the same kind of violent threat, they'd have to completely ignore most of the New Testament.
I've read much of the Koran, I haven't found the same kinds of sentiments or statements in Islam. Mohammed was a political power, in charge of an army, who promised his followers lavish rewards if they died fighting for their faith, and had no objection in spreading Islam by military means. Although there will always be a certain percentage of people prone to be "nutjobs", I can't help but think that the Christian history and scriptures at least tend to make nutjobs less violent, while the Muslim history and scriptures don't.
They're isolated from family, financially dependent on their employer, and trapped in a society that's alien and frightening to them.
And whose legal and cultural system they don't understand. There's a quote from movie, where a factory owner in London is trying to get one of his workers, a woman illegally immigrated from Turkey, for a sexual favor. He basically says, if you don't do it, I'll report you to the government, and they'll throw you in jail. "And British jail is not like your Turkish jail, where the men and women are kept separate. If you go to jail you will be raped every night, over and over again." 100% bullshit, but 100% effective.
Frankly and depressingly I find closed source developers to be much more helpful and even willing to accept suggestions and help than elitist open source jerks.
Every time you ask a question, you are asking someone to donate time to you. A lot of people are either volunteers, or they're working for a company with their own priorities and schedule. So turn it around. Why do you expect people to just give you time for free?
If you'd ever seen e-mail after e-mail of someone wanting to contribute something / get into coding on a project, and spent hours of your life (via e-mail) trying to help them hobble along, only to find out that they are completely incapable of doing simple debugging, or sometimes even of interpreting a very plain gcc warning ("It says, variable X may not be initialized." [I glance at the 20-line function.] "What happens if Y is false? What will variable X be set to?" "Oh, good catch!") you'd understand why people are short on mailing lists.
I genuinely want to help people become developers for my project. But I don't have the time or emotional energy to teach basic OS primitives (like, what a spinlock is and how to use it), much less teach people basic debugging skills. Often you'll spend a lot of effort trying to describe something (say, 20-30 minutes writing an e-mail) and the person asking for help will only write 2 lines back asking for more, without any evidence of having spent at least 20-30 minutes trying to get it working themselves. So where I am now is this: spend no more than 5 minutes, and give them just enough hints to get them to the next question. If they manage to sort out how to do X on their own, and to ask the next question, I'll give them another 5 minutes. If they've shown evidence that they're really stuck and have tried a bunch of different things, I'll spend more time, but not more time than I think they've spent.
But the fact is, the vast majority of time, the interaction eventually shows that the person is not (at this point, perhaps ever) capable of contributing to the project. And rarely does the person asking acknowledge the time they're asking me to commit to helping them. I'm a natural optimist, and I naturally love to teach people. So at the moment, hope (plus a handful of positive interactions) keeps me trying, even in the face of overwhelming defeat. I can easily understand why people of a different character come to despise those kinds of questions.
My experience is, if you make it clear that you respect someone's time, and have spent a reasonable amount of effort trying to figure it out yourself before asking for help, people are more than willing to give you a hand.
If a survey designed to measure the scientific literacy of the general public find that large numbers of people choose religious beliefs over factual knowledge, that is a valuable datum indicating that scientific illiteracy is alarmingly high.
Beliefs about both science and religion should be much more nuanced than it sounds like the questions really were. For example, "The universe began with a big explosion". A religious person may believe that the universe began when God "created the heavens and the earth"; but that doesn't preclude a big explosion being involved. Furthermore, a proper scientist, when asked about the Big Bang, may say things like, "That theory best explains the current data about our universe", or "it's plausible, but I have some reservations about it"; the strongest thing any self respecting scientist can possibly say is, "All of the data collected over the last several years appears to support that hypothesis, so I will believe it to be true until evidence shows otherwise."
So if you believe that God made the universe, and that current scientific understanding points to the evidence of the Big Bang (but you understand that science may change its mind at any moment), saying "I agree" to "The universe began with a big explosion" seems a bit simplistic.
...many pro-lifers seem to care very much for the "unborn baby" up to the point of birth and then don't want to be bothered with it or the new mother.
All of the active pro-lifers I know also support "Crisis pregnancy" centers and other things which actively support women who decide to keep their child. (This isn't the kind of thing that usually gets pro-lifers in national news.) I was talking mostly of people who may vote anti-abortion consistently but aren't as active in those kinds of pro-life activity.
Other religions, and many other people, see life as starting either when the fetus is viable outside of the womb or when it is born. (Or someone else along the way.) Thus the whole "protect unborn children" thing isn't as simple as you make it out to be.
And some cultures used to define "humanity" (i.e., when you had rights, when it was illegal to kill you) as even further out: when you could speak. So in ancient Greece, it was common for unwanted infants to be placed on the city walls to die of exposure. Their cries and thrashing were heeded as little as the movements of "fetuses" in ultrasounds as they're being dismembered alive. Further back, it was common for infants to be incinerated as a sacrifice to gods like Molloch. Jews and Christians were thought to be a bit daft for not only refusing to do those kinds of things, but for rescuing infants they found on the city walls and raising them as their own. If we treat infants as human beings with rights in our own society, it's largely as a result of our Judeo-Christian heritage.
I think I'd be willing to live with abortion being limited to those who hadn't reached certain well-defined stages of development, either thought necessary to have some level of consciousness, or necessary to survive outside the womb.
I suppose a way that modern pro-lifers could "put their money where their mouths are", the way the early Chrisitans did, would be to put themselves on a list of people willing to unconditionally adopt children (regardless of parentage or potential congenital defects) if women considering abortion are willing to go full-term.
and a useful reminder of how petty, small-minded and stupid some people can be.
Is that why you read Slashdot too?:-)
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
A buddy sends me link to all sorts of sites while we chat, from looking up a product on ebay.com or newegg.com to articles about technology or automotive. I have to copy the link, then close out of the chat, and then switch to the browser, paste the URL (because no way on earth I'm going to type it again). It works even though it is cumbersome.
Sounds like a chat app with a built-in split-screen browser might be pretty popular then...
You want for us to fight clean. Your and the enemy's goals are compatible.
I'd put it differently. I'd say, "we" don't want innocent men and women hurt. The enemy doesn't give a damn. In fact, it's good for them if innocent men and women are hurt by the US military. They fire deliberately from crowds and ambulances not only because they know it makes it difficult for "us" to fire back, but also because it causes incidences like this which are a PR disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
If I grabbed someone off the street and kept them locked up in a small room for 5 years, I'd be a kidnapper, right? So let's try a variation:
The trick is that locking someone up in prison, after they've had a fair trial, isn't kidnapping.
So, same thing with murder. Killing isn't illegal; murder is illegal. Purposeful killing is usually murder, but there are some exceptions. For example, if you kill someone who was about to kill or do grevious bodily injury to you or someone else, it's not murder. Similarly, if a person is directed by the judiciary, after a fair trial, to execute someone, it's not murder either.
The death penalty may be unnecessary, unhelpful, or wrong for some other reason. But if you stick by the argument you make here, we couldn't make any punishment: If the death penalty is murder, then jail is kidnapping, fines are theft.
Does everyone have RPGs? Are they legal to own in Iraq? If you look at this clip of the video, you'll see a guy carrying something that looks exactly like an RPG. It's definitely not a camera.
If you look at this video, you'll see one of them carrying something that looks exactly like an RPG. It is definitely not a camera.
How about the one showing someone carrying something that was definitely not a camera? It looks exactly like an RPG, a weapon which put the gunner's life in immediate danger.
The question I have is, why hasn't everyone seen the blow-up clip with the RPG in it?
The short answer is, that the group, as a whole, was not unarmed. If you look carefully, one of the guys has something that looks exactly like an RPG. It's definitely not a camera. It's a shame that he journalists were killed, but they were walking around in a warzone with people carrying weapons.
What's difficult for me to understand is why everyone who saw the first video hasn't seen the video clip with the RPG in it as well.
The explanation is simple: the group wasn't unarmed. If you look carefully at the video, one of the guys is carrying something that looks exactly like an RPG. Here's a close-up. It's definitely not a camera. So it's a shame that the two photographers were killed, but they were walking around in broad daylight in a warzone with someone slinging a weapon over their shoulder.
No, the changing economics will change how people behave. Right now, it's both cheaper and faster for me to take a flight from the UK to just about anywhere in Europe. Same taking a train any distance in the US. So why should I waste my time and money on a train?
But taking an airplane releases a ton more CO2 -- and thus, in reality does cost more, because it damages the environment. It's just that that cost is hidden. So, put the cost into it; make things that damage the environment more expensive, and people will choose less expensive things. If the carbon tax went into play, then taking an airplane from Detroit to Kansas would be 3-4x the cost of taking a train, instead of less. I might still fly to the west coast from the east coast rather than take a 48 hour train ride, but many people wouldn't. There'd be more of a market for high-speed trains, which would make them more economically viable. &c &c.
With driving to work: sure, you're stuck driving to work now because you made your decisions of where to live and what kind of car you have based on different economic conditions; the infrastructure (roads, &c) is build on different economic assumptions, and cultural ideals and aspirations (i.e., a 2-car garage in the suburbs) was built on different economic assumptions. Change the economics permanently, and eventually all of those will change. Your next car will be more fuel efficient. Your next house will be closer to where you work (or your next job will be closer to where you live). Cities will switch from building giant 20-lane superhighways to building more efficient public transit. Developers and city planners will find ways to make nice, high-quality living more densely and efficiently than current suburbia. Cultural aspirations to live in a gigantic new house in a subdivision will change.
We didn't get where we are overnight; we've had 150+ years of the environmental impact of fossil fuels having little to no impact on the economics of their use. It will take a few years for the changed economics to reshape society to be more carbon-efficient. But that's the only way to make long-term change.
Bzzt.
Ask the opposite question: What's so good about swearing? Why do people do it? Why does it feel more powerful to say, "What the fuck is wrong with you?" than "What the heck is wrong with you?" Because those words are artifically endowed with power by society. If people didn't consider them "bad", there wouldn't be any particular reason to use them. When you swear, you demonstrate that you do think there's something special about the word, or you wouldn't use it.
If anything, sprinkling in illogical references sexual intercourse, body parts, and religious concepts to artificially increase the power of any sentence seems like "magical thinking" to me.
The irony of this whole thing is that the only point in saying those words is that they are considered "evil, bad, and offensive". The two sentences, "What the heck is wrong with you?" and "What the fuck is wrong with you?" are both exactly the same -- except that the second one has the "evil, bad, and offensive" word. That's the only reason to favor the second one over the first one. If no one thought "fuck" was a "bad word", no one would use it.
This is part of the problem -- Universities are saying, "We're not helping people get jobs, we're making you a well-rounded individual", but nobody is listening. Everyone else -- from teachers, parents, hiring managers, politicians -- says going to university is a good career move. And there's no particular incentive for Universities to disabuse people of this notion before they've invested $100k to become a "more well-rounded individual".
A lot of people I know in that situation (not necessarily including you in this) didn't actually have a goal in the first place. They went to college and studied what they liked, thinking (perhaps not consciously, but evidenced by their actions) that when they graduated they would be handed a comfortable job on a silver platter. They didn't ask what kind of job they might like to get, and how they could prepare for that. They just took classes they liked: e.g., literary analysis, history, &c. and didn't bother thinking about what they were actually going to do after they graduated, and if they were prepared for it. Many of the people I'm thinking about went to private schools and are therefore under a mountain of debt to boot.
I think a lot of things play into this. Culture says, "a college degree is a way to a better life". As mentioned above, HR managers will require a bachelor's, and sometimes a Master's, for jobs that don't need anywhere near that amount of schooling. Kids are more or less trained in school that if you just do what everyone tells you, check all the tick-boxes, then things will go well for you, and are thus ill-prepared for a world where that's not true. Some people want to be told what to do, and don't have the drive or confidence to to looking for themselves.
And of course, universities sometimes seem oblivious to the fact that what many people think they're buying is a ticket to a better life, not simply a liberal education to make them a more well-rounded thinking individual. Unfortunately, there's no particular incentive for universities to disabuse people of this error.
I wonder if in part our problem is that there are few programs that include elements of both vocational training and liberal education. You either study at university, where you are taught things to expand your horizons but no marketable job skills, or you go to a trade / vocational school, and are taught only job skills but not necessarily a liberal education, to help expand your mind. (Not been to a tech / vocational school, so feel free correct me if I'm wrong here.) The main exception I've seen to this is engineering.
Imagine if there were a 3- or 4-year degree for "smart tradesmen" (think roofers, carpenters, electircians, &c) that included some history, science, literature, &c, a solid foundation in running a business (since these guys are probably sharp enough to be either managers or business owners), in addition to the skills required to actually do the job.
Or, if at universities, you had two required components of your major: one was your "Liberal education focus", one was your "Vocation focus". You could major in history and accounting, or music and restaurant management.
But the question here is whether they can claim copyright on the code he wrote before he was working for them. I think the answer is no; I have a friend who successfully claimed personal ownership of patents that a university wanted dibs on for similar reasons. In that case, the code he wrote while employed by them is owned by them, but can't be distributed (probably even internally -- you are making copies, after all) without putting it under the GPL, unless they hire someone to re-write all the code they don't own.
But of course, the correct answer is always, "Consult a lawyer".
Yeah, this is the first thing I thought: spray-paint a libelous message on the judge's house, then sue the judge for libel.
You have to separate the stuff in the Old Testament was about running a government from the rules meant for personal conduct. Yes, the death penalty was often imposed for many offenses (including murder, adultery, being a lazy bum and mooching off your parents after they've tried to get you go get a real job, collecting wood on Saturday after you'd been told not to). But those were laws about what the government should do, not individual citizens. Many governments still impose the death penalty for some forms of murder. Death for a lot of the other ones seems pretty extreme to us now, but in part that's a cultural difference. Most governments at the time had similarly harsh punishments.
There's no indication in the Old Testament that the laws regarding government were meant to last forever, or that any country other than ancient Israel was meant to live under them. There was a period of history where large numbers of Jews had been forcibly removed from Israel, and the Old Testament tells them specifically to keep following the religious customs, but otherwise follow the law of the land they were in and "seek its good". Most of the New Testament Christians were living under Roman rule outside of Israel, and were told to respect the government of whatever country they were in.
As has been said elsewhere, Islam has no provision for separation of Church and State.
Not if one thinks that there is a real, just God, who is going to hold you accountable at the end of your life for what you've done, and are earnestly trying to find out what He thinks.
As a moderate Christian, I'm glad I don't live in a Christian theocracy as well.
That said, there is a significant difference between the foundation of the two religions. Jesus said "...love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and unjust alike." (From Matthew's biography of Jesus) And Peter, one of his disciples, and a leader in early Christianity, wrote: "God called you to do good, even if it means suffering, just as Christ suffered for you. He is your example, and you must follow in his steps. He never sinned, nor ever deceived anyone. He did not retaliate when he was insulted, nor threaten revenge when he suffered. He left his case in the hands of God, who always judges fairly." (Letter from Peter, one of Jesus' disciples, to early Christians). For a "Christian" nutjob to make the same kind of violent threat, they'd have to completely ignore most of the New Testament.
I've read much of the Koran, I haven't found the same kinds of sentiments or statements in Islam. Mohammed was a political power, in charge of an army, who promised his followers lavish rewards if they died fighting for their faith, and had no objection in spreading Islam by military means. Although there will always be a certain percentage of people prone to be "nutjobs", I can't help but think that the Christian history and scriptures at least tend to make nutjobs less violent, while the Muslim history and scriptures don't.
And whose legal and cultural system they don't understand. There's a quote from movie, where a factory owner in London is trying to get one of his workers, a woman illegally immigrated from Turkey, for a sexual favor. He basically says, if you don't do it, I'll report you to the government, and they'll throw you in jail. "And British jail is not like your Turkish jail, where the men and women are kept separate. If you go to jail you will be raped every night, over and over again." 100% bullshit, but 100% effective.
Every time you ask a question, you are asking someone to donate time to you. A lot of people are either volunteers, or they're working for a company with their own priorities and schedule. So turn it around. Why do you expect people to just give you time for free?
If you'd ever seen e-mail after e-mail of someone wanting to contribute something / get into coding on a project, and spent hours of your life (via e-mail) trying to help them hobble along, only to find out that they are completely incapable of doing simple debugging, or sometimes even of interpreting a very plain gcc warning ("It says, variable X may not be initialized." [I glance at the 20-line function.] "What happens if Y is false? What will variable X be set to?" "Oh, good catch!") you'd understand why people are short on mailing lists.
I genuinely want to help people become developers for my project. But I don't have the time or emotional energy to teach basic OS primitives (like, what a spinlock is and how to use it), much less teach people basic debugging skills. Often you'll spend a lot of effort trying to describe something (say, 20-30 minutes writing an e-mail) and the person asking for help will only write 2 lines back asking for more, without any evidence of having spent at least 20-30 minutes trying to get it working themselves. So where I am now is this: spend no more than 5 minutes, and give them just enough hints to get them to the next question. If they manage to sort out how to do X on their own, and to ask the next question, I'll give them another 5 minutes. If they've shown evidence that they're really stuck and have tried a bunch of different things, I'll spend more time, but not more time than I think they've spent.
But the fact is, the vast majority of time, the interaction eventually shows that the person is not (at this point, perhaps ever) capable of contributing to the project. And rarely does the person asking acknowledge the time they're asking me to commit to helping them. I'm a natural optimist, and I naturally love to teach people. So at the moment, hope (plus a handful of positive interactions) keeps me trying, even in the face of overwhelming defeat. I can easily understand why people of a different character come to despise those kinds of questions.
My experience is, if you make it clear that you respect someone's time, and have spent a reasonable amount of effort trying to figure it out yourself before asking for help, people are more than willing to give you a hand.
Beliefs about both science and religion should be much more nuanced than it sounds like the questions really were. For example, "The universe began with a big explosion". A religious person may believe that the universe began when God "created the heavens and the earth"; but that doesn't preclude a big explosion being involved. Furthermore, a proper scientist, when asked about the Big Bang, may say things like, "That theory best explains the current data about our universe", or "it's plausible, but I have some reservations about it"; the strongest thing any self respecting scientist can possibly say is, "All of the data collected over the last several years appears to support that hypothesis, so I will believe it to be true until evidence shows otherwise."
So if you believe that God made the universe, and that current scientific understanding points to the evidence of the Big Bang (but you understand that science may change its mind at any moment), saying "I agree" to "The universe began with a big explosion" seems a bit simplistic.
All of the active pro-lifers I know also support "Crisis pregnancy" centers and other things which actively support women who decide to keep their child. (This isn't the kind of thing that usually gets pro-lifers in national news.) I was talking mostly of people who may vote anti-abortion consistently but aren't as active in those kinds of pro-life activity.
And some cultures used to define "humanity" (i.e., when you had rights, when it was illegal to kill you) as even further out: when you could speak. So in ancient Greece, it was common for unwanted infants to be placed on the city walls to die of exposure. Their cries and thrashing were heeded as little as the movements of "fetuses" in ultrasounds as they're being dismembered alive. Further back, it was common for infants to be incinerated as a sacrifice to gods like Molloch. Jews and Christians were thought to be a bit daft for not only refusing to do those kinds of things, but for rescuing infants they found on the city walls and raising them as their own. If we treat infants as human beings with rights in our own society, it's largely as a result of our Judeo-Christian heritage.
I think I'd be willing to live with abortion being limited to those who hadn't reached certain well-defined stages of development, either thought necessary to have some level of consciousness, or necessary to survive outside the womb.
I suppose a way that modern pro-lifers could "put their money where their mouths are", the way the early Chrisitans did, would be to put themselves on a list of people willing to unconditionally adopt children (regardless of parentage or potential congenital defects) if women considering abortion are willing to go full-term.
First, someone had an RPG (or, what sure looks like one). I think they were pretty justified in firing, then.
Is that why you read Slashdot too? :-)
Sounds like a chat app with a built-in split-screen browser might be pretty popular then...
I'd put it differently. I'd say, "we" don't want innocent men and women hurt. The enemy doesn't give a damn. In fact, it's good for them if innocent men and women are hurt by the US military. They fire deliberately from crowds and ambulances not only because they know it makes it difficult for "us" to fire back, but also because it causes incidences like this which are a PR disaster.