(something about traffic circles being less death inducing than 4 way intersections).
It would seem reasonable that a glancing blow is less fatal than a t-bone. The entrance of a roundabout forces you to turn nearly parallel to existing traffic to enter.
The answer is easy--in America we have far too many SUVs and Pickup Trucks.
That's an opinion, not a fact. And it's probably not the right answer, since most easy answers aren't.
I'd say it has more to do with the kinds of roads. In the US, we've got wonderful freeways that entice people to go fast. In the UK, not so many. From what I remember of the place, even the largest "freeways" are only four lane divided. Maybe different around London...
Also, many of the roads at the small end are smaller in the UK. I remember a lot of one-lane roads once you get into the more rural areas, and I've found very few such here, until you get into the largely untravelled forest roads. You're going to go slower on a road where you know someone else can be coming at you head on.
usually driven by the worst drivers
Your confirmation bias is showing. You hate the vehicle, so the drivers must be hateful, too.
due to driving a ten-foot tall miniature house.
Now you've ruined any possible value of your argument by using such hyperbole. I don't know of a ten foot tall SUV, although the Chevy Suburban is large. Mine is about 5'.
While affirmative action is definitely trading one kind of oppression for another, the previous poster was complaining about oppression in America, not Canada.
Why, yes, Canada is the only country in the world that has "affirmative action" and thus it is impossible to find anything similar in the US of A. Like lower standards for members of "underrepresented groups" wanting to be police officers or soldiers, for example. Or getting into graduate school. Or med school. Like Brown v. BOE. That didn't happen in the US of A.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Was this in America or Canada?
Psssst, don't look now, but the map has changed since you went to school. Canada is part of America. North America. Just like the US of A. Yes, that's pedantic, but so too is you pointing out an example is from Canada for something that goes on in the US as well.
A pointer dereferencing to NULL would be a pointer pointing to a null pointer.
That would be "a pointer dereferencing to a NULL pointer". A "pointer dereferencing to NULL" would be a pointer to a NULL value.
I learned 68000 and VAX assembly code when I learned C. The best way to learn what a C statement is actually doing (with all those & and * and [] and stuff) is to have the compiler dump the assembly and look at it. It's also a good way to see what optimizations the compiler is trying to do.
I have a feeling the main best use for people who know how hardware acts these days are 1) high performance computing specialists who need to worry about cache hits and row vs. column-wise data access, and 2) people porting an app from a large-capacity system to a low capacity one.
Yes, human time is important, but a software system that needs to keep up with realtime but it can't because the programming is sloppy is not worth much, and the savings of being able to use a smaller cheaper processor in 1,000,000 units of a consumer device can make up for it.
I think they'll just make an FAQ with about 15 questions and answers, which should answer almost all questions the students are expected to have.
If simply reading an answer was what learning was all about, then why not just read the book and know everything?
I think the reason for recitiations and help sessions is for the interactiveness of the teacher/student experience. Eliza spitting back a canned answer to what it thinks your question is isn't teaching.
"When asked how they would deal with ten thousand students, Professor Thrun replied, 'We'll let Skynet handle the sorting and choose the best questions'"
So if you ask a mundane, typical question you get no answer?
It was obvious that an AI course being offered for free would be taught by AI programs. This is the perfect testing grounds for the latest generation of AI programs. Much more difficult than "what is AI, Alex?" or "who was that strange woman in your bedroom, Alex?"
Are you not on facebook, myspace, Google+, Linked In, or any other social networks?
I am on some of them, but none of them have the information about who my former roommates are. Even if I told them that, for whatever reason I cannot imagine, that would not allow them to know that a name that is associated with a google-saved bit of SQL code is the same person as my ex-roommate. Then we'd have to get around the tiny detail that Google would somehow have to get that information from LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, without my permission, to be able to use it.
Do you follow any blogs/rss feeds? Do you freequent one specific site?
I was unaware that using an RSS feed (such as/.'s) required listing with the provider anything about ex-roommates or their current web posting habits.
Maybe the SQL isn't even from your friend. Maybe it's a site they freequent.
I'm sorry, I thought the person I replied to said: "There's two solutions, but one of them comes from a blog that is written by your former room mate and gets bumped up." I assumed "written by your former room mate" meant it was from your former roommate.
Who knows, but social weighting on search results is the next logical step as social networking data is built.
So, LIKE I SAID, you appear to want Google to include every name in your contact list and email address book in the search. Maybe not as a primary search key, but as a secondary key in helping to assign weight to the primary results. And since you listed them, it seems you want Facebook, LinkedIn, myspace, et.al., to provide this information to google so google can use it.
Looking for a bit of SQL? There's two solutions, but one of them comes from a blog that is written by your former room mate and gets bumped up.
So, do you want Google keeping track of who your former roommates are and that the specific bit of SQL was written not only by someone with the same name but who is actually the same person? Unless you know ahead of time that he is involved in the answer and tell Google to bump the score based on that, Google would have to keep track of it for you so it can do it automatically.
Otherwise, why not just include your roommate's name in the google search yourself and let Google guess why that name is relevant to the search?
Although, I guess if you are going to let Google keep all your personal email and paw through it when they want to, you might as well let them keep track of who your friends and roommates are. Maybe your wish for "friend bumps" can be as simple as Google automatically including the names of all the people in your mailbox and contact list in every search?
Bing was a crooner from the fourties and fifties, often appearing with Bob Hope in the series of movies known as the "Road to" pictures. Road to Morocco, Road to Bali, etc. His last name was Crosby.
Do not confuse him with Bill Cosby, although I expect that Google will ask you "did you mean Bing Cosby?" should you Google the name. Also not the same as Norm Crosby.
I found it interesting that the article states that there is "almost no chance of losing" if you buy enough tickets, but that's not a 100% guarantee.
Yes, actually, it is a guarantee with this kind of game. Not with scratch-offs, but with a keno style game, you simply buy enough tickets to cover all the possible "three, four or five number out of 6" combinations. Another poster gave the example of a 1,2,3,4,5 game with a two-number jackpot and one-number winner. If you buy three tickets, you can be guaranteed of at least one one-number win, and potentially two ( 1/2, 3/4, and 5/anything). The only way you don't get a single number win is if you hit the jackpot. If you buy ten tickets, you are guaranteed a two-number win (and two other one-number winners). The numbers get larger for larger sets, of course, but are still finite.
It is only for this reason that the Cash WinFall game, with a finite set of possible choices and payouts that eventually get above the odds, can be considered broken. If it were a typical lottery scratch-off game, then no, it wouldn't be.
"Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."
- Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
In other words, religion is useful for keeping the idiots in line.
No, that is not "in other words." He clearly refers to people with a "refined education", so he's saying even smart people cannot be relied upon to be moral without religious principles to back them up.
Karl Marx was a pretty smart fellow. Stalin, ditto. You don't get to be a dictator without some intelligence. Castro. It's the words of the Marxist and Stalinist who say that religion is the opiate of the masses, not Washington.
So maybe Washington was wrong.
Yes, given your ridiculous interpretation of what he said, he'd be wrong. But it is your mistake, not his.
Yes, you did. You're here arguing that it is unconstitutional, and to be so it must do something to establish a religion. That's what the 1st amendment prohibits. Not "endorsing". Not simply "respecting" religion. You can change the words or leave them out to get a different meaning, but you need to argue what they actually are. "no law respecting an establishment of religion..." "Establishment" is a mandatory word in that phrase.
I think you returned to that strawman because you had no response for what I actually wrote about the meaning of "respect."
If you think I had no response to your misinterpretation of that word in the context of the first amendment, then you are not reading what is being written. I covered your mistake in detail. Remember the word "regarding"? No, I thought not. "Respect" has more meanings than the old Aretha Franklin lyric, and hers was not what was meant here.
If you aren't going to read what I write, why should I bother?
I don't know if it is truly unconstitutional or not, but it sure as heck isn't neutral with respect to religion,
Show me where it says that the government must be "neutral" with respect to religion. Are tax exemptions for churches and tax deductions unconstitutional because they express that there is a value to the society as a whole when people donate money to churches? That's not "neutral", that's actively supporting and actually promoting donations!
The word you are looking for is "establishment", and a motto printed on a dollar bill doesn't establish anything. Hell, the fact that the same dollar bill says "legal tender for all debts, public and private" doesn't create a requirement for anyone to accept them in payment for debts. If such a patently obvious claim as to the use of the money doesn't create a requirement that it be accepted for that use, a simple motto cannot create anything but a tempest in a teapot for those who want to feel like victims.
If the bar for showing religious endorsement is set that high then thousands of rulings about state establishments of religion should be over-turned.
Yes, they should be. I agree. There is a lot of judicial malarky that is based on the culture of victimhood that we've created in our free land, this being just one part. (And criminalizing public speech because it may hurt someone's feelings is this malarky writ exceedingly large.) But then, state governments may have different constitutional protections and limitations, so what happens in state courts isn't necessarily relevant to the US Constitution.
Again with the specious arguments. Expecting people to religiously follow a law that wasn't to be written yet for over a decade is ridiculous.
You don't get it. You claimed that the fact that the Continental Congress was formed 13 years prior to the Constitution meant something with respect to ("regarding") the prayer being used to open the session. The only way that could be true is if they thought it was OK for there to be some establishment of religion in the government then and only later (in those intervening 13 years) changed their mind about it and wrote the 1st amendment to prevent it.
Sorry, but that's the ridiculous argument. From the days of the Pilgrims (long before that CC) the existance of a state mandated church was an issue. It was an issue in the CC. Everybody knew about the Church of England and that a state-mandated church was a bad thing. The members of the Continental Congress were not undecided on the matter. They knew what they were doing and what they didn't want happening in the new US. The fact that they still had a chaplain open the session with a prayer must not have been what they were worried about enough to eventually codify it in the 1st Amendment. If it was ok for them to do it for the first CC, then it could not have been unacceptable enough to merit an eventual amendment to prevent it.
They would not have needed a law in place to prevent them from inviting a Reverend into the session, if they truly thought that doing so was an establishment of religion as meant by what they later wrote as the 1st amendment. And indeed, many of the same people were involved in both processes.
Well, except for the fact they explicitly left out any mention of God in the constitution itself.
So what? They left out the word "persimmon", as well.
Shall I point out that they did include the word "God", as well as several references to his Being, in the Declaration of Independence? Funny how declaring the independence of one's government from another using a plea to God for his forebearance and consideration doesn't "establish religion", but putting a simple motto on money does.
I'll take it even further and point out that "God" was added to the pledge of allegiance and the national motto "In God We Trust" was adopted in response to the "godless communists" making the intent as an endorsement of religion pretty straight-foward.
You are still wrong. Not a single word you are complaining about establishes ANYTHING. No churches popped up the day after those words were added, and nobody runs to church just because they heard them said (or read them on their money.) Certainly nobody who doesn't believe in God is harmed in any way by the existance of those words, nor is their opinon of God or the lack thereof modified in any way. Now, it may hurt their feelings to find out that other people don't agree that "there is no God", but then, this whole discussion arose because of how stupid it is to base laws on whether someone's feelings get hurt.
By the way, I noticed you changed your argument from "establishment" to "endorsement". If that's what it takes to win, ok. You win. The President endorses religion every time he goes to church, so sue him. He endorsed it repeatedly during the campaign when he told us he was a regular attendee. He
Are you always this pedantic? I randomly banged on the keyboard to get that number,
Do you always randomly bang on the keyboard when you are having what I thought was an adult discussion about something? Thanks for letting me know. If you are trying to make a point that requires math, and you claim knowledge of the subject, maybe "randomly bang[ing] on the keyboard" isn't the best way to convey that information. Just saying, ya' know.
By the way, the correct odds for 6 of 6 in Cash WinFall are
1 in 9,366,819. The lower levels are 1 in 39,028.41, 1 in 800.58, and 1 in 47.40, respectively.
It's even more foolish for someone already on a tight budget. That's point,
I guess if you are going to randomly bang on the keyboard when you make a reply, actually reading what you are replying to isn't necessary. That's not the point. The point was that buying more tickets does, indeed, increase the chances of winning, which is the sole claim that I was replying to.
Businesses need to have a unique way to identify their clients.
So, I see you want to argue a nation id system. Ok.
Businesses are not the US Government.
Every business I have dealt with has been able to create a unique account number of their own for me.
I could go on, but that sufficiently deals with the "Businesses need..." argument.
Using a unique number as identification is no different than using a combination of name, birthday, and some other properties, except that the number is much more convenient.
Other than the fact that the government did not issue me my name, birthday, or "some other properties", you've forgotten that a "state issued number" which lacks any reference to name, gender, height, weight, color of hair, birthdate, place of residence, or any other physical property specific to the individual, is so trivally stolen and misused by criminals as to be laughable as a true "ID" of any kind.
Could you provide some argument that supports why the US Government needs to issue and track that number, please? "Business needs..." doesn't come anywhere close. I'd even say it was laughable as an excuse, if I was in flamebait mode.
Of course it does. It is an official acknowledgement of a God.
If you think that "an official acknowledgement of a God" is an "establishment" of a state religion, then you are speaking a language other than english and there is nothing further that can be said. Or you have no clue what a religion is, or what "religion" meant in the context of the first amendment and those who wrote it. The day that the motto "In God We Trust" in any way, shape or form forces any person to hold any specific belief, much less to hold any specific belief in order to deal with the US government, you would have some argument.
It's ironic that the court rulings against my position actually indicate that your reading of the amendment is the lesser one here.
You admit that the court rulings don't favor your position and continue to claim that you are right. How novel.
I am aware of how statistics work. It has an effect, just not a statistically notable effect.
I'd say that an asymptotic approach to certainty is a "statistically notable effect". While 100 tickets in a 1:200000 lottery may not be very close to 1 at that point, it certainly has reached a statistically significant point. "Almost double" (for just two tickets) is statistically significant.
Certainly odds of 1 out of 7809327498375098375987342509837098
Wow. I' ve heard some real hyperbole in this forum, but not in such a numerically quantifiable manner. I might have lost count with all the digits, but it looks like your number is 26 orders of magnitude off from reality. My 1:10 example was only 6 orders off, but it was not presented as a reality. I think my numbers are closer to the truth.
... then clearly spending taxes on an endorsement of a religion counts as supporting it.
I've found that when people resort to "it's obvious" or "clearly", they are arguing a losing side. This motto does not support any "religion". Nobody wakes up one morning, notices the motto on the dollar bill, and runs to church because obviously there's something good to be found there if the "state" says we trust them.
You mean 13 years before the constitution was written?
Why, obviously, they decided in those thirteen years that the Church of England was a Bad Thing and decided that such an abomination cannot be allowed to continue. Interesting, though, that I found that information on the web page of the official Chaplain of the US House of Representatives, a current and ongoing office within the US Government.
You do realize that the Continental Congress was already opposing the British rule, even 13 years prior to the official writing of the Constitution, don't you? That the establishment of the Church of England as part of the government was already a bone of contention (even as early as the first settlers -- the Pilgrims -- many years before the Continental Congress). By deliberately ignoring these facts, it seems that you are the one pushing an agenda by trying to hide the facts.
If the office is at all funded with tax payer money then it seems like a pretty clear violation to me.
Well, then, that seems to point to the fact that you are wrong. You need to look at the reason for the amendment and the statement to understand what it means. As another poster has pointed out, simply claiming "separation of church and state" (which is not found therein) is so vague a statement that it can run from "government cannot use the word 'god' in anything" all the way to "cannot establish a state church" (which is what it really means).
You might notice that at no time in history has the former interpretation been valid, even the day after the amendment was adopted by the very people who wrote it. I need nothing more than that knowledge to know that a ridiculously limited interpretation is wrong.
I'm all for freedom to live your life the way you want and all that. But for the *state* to openly exploit its citizens with these parasitic lotteries makes my stomach turn.
I'm all for the state allowing its citizens (and those from neighboring states) to voluntarily donate their money to pay for state services on the off-chance that those citizens will get a good payout, rather than have the state take money by force from everyone to pay for things that not everyone wants or uses.
It is hard to call someone doing something totally voluntarily as "being exploited", since all they would need to do to stop being exploited is... not do it.
If you call this "exploitation", then you must also view the voluntary exchange of money for sex ("prostitution") as a serious crime, since you can argue that one side is exploiting the other.
Aside from the assertion the card, why do you think it would be bad ?
I think the promise of the government not to do something when they are trying to get rid of objections to that process should be sufficient to make it a bad idea on its face.
Beyond that, we're into a discussion of the idea of a national ID card, which is arguably bad, and not an argument I want to get into today.
Slashdot Mirror
(something about traffic circles being less death inducing than 4 way intersections).
It would seem reasonable that a glancing blow is less fatal than a t-bone. The entrance of a roundabout forces you to turn nearly parallel to existing traffic to enter.
The answer is easy--in America we have far too many SUVs and Pickup Trucks.
That's an opinion, not a fact. And it's probably not the right answer, since most easy answers aren't.
I'd say it has more to do with the kinds of roads. In the US, we've got wonderful freeways that entice people to go fast. In the UK, not so many. From what I remember of the place, even the largest "freeways" are only four lane divided. Maybe different around London...
Also, many of the roads at the small end are smaller in the UK. I remember a lot of one-lane roads once you get into the more rural areas, and I've found very few such here, until you get into the largely untravelled forest roads. You're going to go slower on a road where you know someone else can be coming at you head on.
usually driven by the worst drivers
Your confirmation bias is showing. You hate the vehicle, so the drivers must be hateful, too.
due to driving a ten-foot tall miniature house.
Now you've ruined any possible value of your argument by using such hyperbole. I don't know of a ten foot tall SUV, although the Chevy Suburban is large. Mine is about 5'.
535. Typing with a baby in one arm while dealing with a toddler.
Did I hear you right? Dealing with congress is like dealing with 100 babies and 435 toddlers? Or the other way around?
While affirmative action is definitely trading one kind of oppression for another, the previous poster was complaining about oppression in America, not Canada.
Why, yes, Canada is the only country in the world that has "affirmative action" and thus it is impossible to find anything similar in the US of A. Like lower standards for members of "underrepresented groups" wanting to be police officers or soldiers, for example. Or getting into graduate school. Or med school. Like Brown v. BOE. That didn't happen in the US of A.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Was this in America or Canada?
Psssst, don't look now, but the map has changed since you went to school. Canada is part of America. North America. Just like the US of A. Yes, that's pedantic, but so too is you pointing out an example is from Canada for something that goes on in the US as well.
A pointer dereferencing to NULL would be a pointer pointing to a null pointer.
That would be "a pointer dereferencing to a NULL pointer". A "pointer dereferencing to NULL" would be a pointer to a NULL value.
I learned 68000 and VAX assembly code when I learned C. The best way to learn what a C statement is actually doing (with all those & and * and [] and stuff) is to have the compiler dump the assembly and look at it. It's also a good way to see what optimizations the compiler is trying to do.
I have a feeling the main best use for people who know how hardware acts these days are 1) high performance computing specialists who need to worry about cache hits and row vs. column-wise data access, and 2) people porting an app from a large-capacity system to a low capacity one.
Yes, human time is important, but a software system that needs to keep up with realtime but it can't because the programming is sloppy is not worth much, and the savings of being able to use a smaller cheaper processor in 1,000,000 units of a consumer device can make up for it.
I think they'll just make an FAQ with about 15 questions and answers, which should answer almost all questions the students are expected to have.
If simply reading an answer was what learning was all about, then why not just read the book and know everything?
I think the reason for recitiations and help sessions is for the interactiveness of the teacher/student experience. Eliza spitting back a canned answer to what it thinks your question is isn't teaching.
"When asked how they would deal with ten thousand students, Professor Thrun replied, 'We'll let Skynet handle the sorting and choose the best questions'"
So if you ask a mundane, typical question you get no answer?
It was obvious that an AI course being offered for free would be taught by AI programs. This is the perfect testing grounds for the latest generation of AI programs. Much more difficult than "what is AI, Alex?" or "who was that strange woman in your bedroom, Alex?"
Are you not on facebook, myspace, Google+, Linked In, or any other social networks?
I am on some of them, but none of them have the information about who my former roommates are. Even if I told them that, for whatever reason I cannot imagine, that would not allow them to know that a name that is associated with a google-saved bit of SQL code is the same person as my ex-roommate. Then we'd have to get around the tiny detail that Google would somehow have to get that information from LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, without my permission, to be able to use it.
Do you follow any blogs/rss feeds? Do you freequent one specific site?
I was unaware that using an RSS feed (such as /.'s) required listing with the provider anything about ex-roommates or their current web posting habits.
Maybe the SQL isn't even from your friend. Maybe it's a site they freequent.
I'm sorry, I thought the person I replied to said: "There's two solutions, but one of them comes from a blog that is written by your former room mate and gets bumped up." I assumed "written by your former room mate" meant it was from your former roommate.
Who knows, but social weighting on search results is the next logical step as social networking data is built.
So, LIKE I SAID, you appear to want Google to include every name in your contact list and email address book in the search. Maybe not as a primary search key, but as a secondary key in helping to assign weight to the primary results. And since you listed them, it seems you want Facebook, LinkedIn, myspace, et.al., to provide this information to google so google can use it.
Personally, I don't want google doing that. YMMV.
All I want it to do is actually, you know, search for the thing I entered in the search bar, ....
Did you mean "starch bear"? Showing results for "starch bear"...
Looking for a bit of SQL? There's two solutions, but one of them comes from a blog that is written by your former room mate and gets bumped up.
So, do you want Google keeping track of who your former roommates are and that the specific bit of SQL was written not only by someone with the same name but who is actually the same person? Unless you know ahead of time that he is involved in the answer and tell Google to bump the score based on that, Google would have to keep track of it for you so it can do it automatically.
Otherwise, why not just include your roommate's name in the google search yourself and let Google guess why that name is relevant to the search?
Although, I guess if you are going to let Google keep all your personal email and paw through it when they want to, you might as well let them keep track of who your friends and roommates are. Maybe your wish for "friend bumps" can be as simple as Google automatically including the names of all the people in your mailbox and contact list in every search?
What's "Bing"?
Bing was a crooner from the fourties and fifties, often appearing with Bob Hope in the series of movies known as the "Road to" pictures. Road to Morocco, Road to Bali, etc. His last name was Crosby.
Do not confuse him with Bill Cosby, although I expect that Google will ask you "did you mean Bing Cosby?" should you Google the name. Also not the same as Norm Crosby.
And with all the 10 pin ribbon connections and little in the way of direct bus access, it's a different level of hardware.
And using .NET, who cares? But 4.5Mb of flash! Woot woot! Don't get blinded by looking at the flash.
1. The game doesn't immediately turn the screen black and require a reboot to get out of it.
2. The vendor makes the customer whole by accepting a return when 1 happens.
3. The manufacturer supports the customer in getting #1 not to happen.
And yes, Duke Nukem Forever, Fry's, and 2d, I'm talking about YOU.
I found it interesting that the article states that there is "almost no chance of losing" if you buy enough tickets, but that's not a 100% guarantee.
Yes, actually, it is a guarantee with this kind of game. Not with scratch-offs, but with a keno style game, you simply buy enough tickets to cover all the possible "three, four or five number out of 6" combinations. Another poster gave the example of a 1,2,3,4,5 game with a two-number jackpot and one-number winner. If you buy three tickets, you can be guaranteed of at least one one-number win, and potentially two ( 1/2, 3/4, and 5/anything). The only way you don't get a single number win is if you hit the jackpot. If you buy ten tickets, you are guaranteed a two-number win (and two other one-number winners). The numbers get larger for larger sets, of course, but are still finite.
It is only for this reason that the Cash WinFall game, with a finite set of possible choices and payouts that eventually get above the odds, can be considered broken. If it were a typical lottery scratch-off game, then no, it wouldn't be.
Even though the winners share the money from the same type of match,
They share the jackpot, but not the lower payouts, according to the Cash WinFall web page.
"Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." - Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
In other words, religion is useful for keeping the idiots in line.
No, that is not "in other words." He clearly refers to people with a "refined education", so he's saying even smart people cannot be relied upon to be moral without religious principles to back them up.
Karl Marx was a pretty smart fellow. Stalin, ditto. You don't get to be a dictator without some intelligence. Castro. It's the words of the Marxist and Stalinist who say that religion is the opiate of the masses, not Washington.
So maybe Washington was wrong.
Yes, given your ridiculous interpretation of what he said, he'd be wrong. But it is your mistake, not his.
Except that I don't and never said I did.
Yes, you did. You're here arguing that it is unconstitutional, and to be so it must do something to establish a religion. That's what the 1st amendment prohibits. Not "endorsing". Not simply "respecting" religion. You can change the words or leave them out to get a different meaning, but you need to argue what they actually are. "no law respecting an establishment of religion..." "Establishment" is a mandatory word in that phrase.
I think you returned to that strawman because you had no response for what I actually wrote about the meaning of "respect."
If you think I had no response to your misinterpretation of that word in the context of the first amendment, then you are not reading what is being written. I covered your mistake in detail. Remember the word "regarding"? No, I thought not. "Respect" has more meanings than the old Aretha Franklin lyric, and hers was not what was meant here.
If you aren't going to read what I write, why should I bother?
I don't know if it is truly unconstitutional or not, but it sure as heck isn't neutral with respect to religion,
Show me where it says that the government must be "neutral" with respect to religion. Are tax exemptions for churches and tax deductions unconstitutional because they express that there is a value to the society as a whole when people donate money to churches? That's not "neutral", that's actively supporting and actually promoting donations!
The word you are looking for is "establishment", and a motto printed on a dollar bill doesn't establish anything. Hell, the fact that the same dollar bill says "legal tender for all debts, public and private" doesn't create a requirement for anyone to accept them in payment for debts. If such a patently obvious claim as to the use of the money doesn't create a requirement that it be accepted for that use, a simple motto cannot create anything but a tempest in a teapot for those who want to feel like victims.
If the bar for showing religious endorsement is set that high then thousands of rulings about state establishments of religion should be over-turned.
Yes, they should be. I agree. There is a lot of judicial malarky that is based on the culture of victimhood that we've created in our free land, this being just one part. (And criminalizing public speech because it may hurt someone's feelings is this malarky writ exceedingly large.) But then, state governments may have different constitutional protections and limitations, so what happens in state courts isn't necessarily relevant to the US Constitution.
Again with the specious arguments. Expecting people to religiously follow a law that wasn't to be written yet for over a decade is ridiculous.
You don't get it. You claimed that the fact that the Continental Congress was formed 13 years prior to the Constitution meant something with respect to ("regarding") the prayer being used to open the session. The only way that could be true is if they thought it was OK for there to be some establishment of religion in the government then and only later (in those intervening 13 years) changed their mind about it and wrote the 1st amendment to prevent it.
Sorry, but that's the ridiculous argument. From the days of the Pilgrims (long before that CC) the existance of a state mandated church was an issue. It was an issue in the CC. Everybody knew about the Church of England and that a state-mandated church was a bad thing. The members of the Continental Congress were not undecided on the matter. They knew what they were doing and what they didn't want happening in the new US. The fact that they still had a chaplain open the session with a prayer must not have been what they were worried about enough to eventually codify it in the 1st Amendment. If it was ok for them to do it for the first CC, then it could not have been unacceptable enough to merit an eventual amendment to prevent it.
They would not have needed a law in place to prevent them from inviting a Reverend into the session, if they truly thought that doing so was an establishment of religion as meant by what they later wrote as the 1st amendment. And indeed, many of the same people were involved in both processes.
Well, except for the fact they explicitly left out any mention of God in the constitution itself.
So what? They left out the word "persimmon", as well.
Shall I point out that they did include the word "God", as well as several references to his Being, in the Declaration of Independence? Funny how declaring the independence of one's government from another using a plea to God for his forebearance and consideration doesn't "establish religion", but putting a simple motto on money does.
I'll take it even further and point out that "God" was added to the pledge of allegiance and the national motto "In God We Trust" was adopted in response to the "godless communists" making the intent as an endorsement of religion pretty straight-foward.
You are still wrong. Not a single word you are complaining about establishes ANYTHING. No churches popped up the day after those words were added, and nobody runs to church just because they heard them said (or read them on their money.) Certainly nobody who doesn't believe in God is harmed in any way by the existance of those words, nor is their opinon of God or the lack thereof modified in any way. Now, it may hurt their feelings to find out that other people don't agree that "there is no God", but then, this whole discussion arose because of how stupid it is to base laws on whether someone's feelings get hurt.
By the way, I noticed you changed your argument from "establishment" to "endorsement". If that's what it takes to win, ok. You win. The President endorses religion every time he goes to church, so sue him. He endorsed it repeatedly during the campaign when he told us he was a regular attendee. He
Are you always this pedantic? I randomly banged on the keyboard to get that number,
Do you always randomly bang on the keyboard when you are having what I thought was an adult discussion about something? Thanks for letting me know. If you are trying to make a point that requires math, and you claim knowledge of the subject, maybe "randomly bang[ing] on the keyboard" isn't the best way to convey that information. Just saying, ya' know.
By the way, the correct odds for 6 of 6 in Cash WinFall are 1 in 9,366,819. The lower levels are 1 in 39,028.41, 1 in 800.58, and 1 in 47.40, respectively.
It's even more foolish for someone already on a tight budget. That's point,
I guess if you are going to randomly bang on the keyboard when you make a reply, actually reading what you are replying to isn't necessary. That's not the point. The point was that buying more tickets does, indeed, increase the chances of winning, which is the sole claim that I was replying to.
Businesses need to have a unique way to identify their clients.
So, I see you want to argue a nation id system. Ok.
I could go on, but that sufficiently deals with the "Businesses need..." argument.
Using a unique number as identification is no different than using a combination of name, birthday, and some other properties, except that the number is much more convenient.
Other than the fact that the government did not issue me my name, birthday, or "some other properties", you've forgotten that a "state issued number" which lacks any reference to name, gender, height, weight, color of hair, birthdate, place of residence, or any other physical property specific to the individual, is so trivally stolen and misused by criminals as to be laughable as a true "ID" of any kind.
Could you provide some argument that supports why the US Government needs to issue and track that number, please? "Business needs ..." doesn't come anywhere close. I'd even say it was laughable as an excuse, if I was in flamebait mode.
Of course it does. It is an official acknowledgement of a God.
If you think that "an official acknowledgement of a God" is an "establishment" of a state religion, then you are speaking a language other than english and there is nothing further that can be said. Or you have no clue what a religion is, or what "religion" meant in the context of the first amendment and those who wrote it. The day that the motto "In God We Trust" in any way, shape or form forces any person to hold any specific belief, much less to hold any specific belief in order to deal with the US government, you would have some argument.
It's ironic that the court rulings against my position actually indicate that your reading of the amendment is the lesser one here.
You admit that the court rulings don't favor your position and continue to claim that you are right. How novel.
I am aware of how statistics work. It has an effect, just not a statistically notable effect.
I'd say that an asymptotic approach to certainty is a "statistically notable effect". While 100 tickets in a 1:200000 lottery may not be very close to 1 at that point, it certainly has reached a statistically significant point. "Almost double" (for just two tickets) is statistically significant.
Certainly odds of 1 out of 7809327498375098375987342509837098
Wow. I' ve heard some real hyperbole in this forum, but not in such a numerically quantifiable manner. I might have lost count with all the digits, but it looks like your number is 26 orders of magnitude off from reality. My 1:10 example was only 6 orders off, but it was not presented as a reality. I think my numbers are closer to the truth.
... then clearly spending taxes on an endorsement of a religion counts as supporting it.
I've found that when people resort to "it's obvious" or "clearly", they are arguing a losing side. This motto does not support any "religion". Nobody wakes up one morning, notices the motto on the dollar bill, and runs to church because obviously there's something good to be found there if the "state" says we trust them.
You mean 13 years before the constitution was written?
Why, obviously, they decided in those thirteen years that the Church of England was a Bad Thing and decided that such an abomination cannot be allowed to continue. Interesting, though, that I found that information on the web page of the official Chaplain of the US House of Representatives, a current and ongoing office within the US Government.
You do realize that the Continental Congress was already opposing the British rule, even 13 years prior to the official writing of the Constitution, don't you? That the establishment of the Church of England as part of the government was already a bone of contention (even as early as the first settlers -- the Pilgrims -- many years before the Continental Congress). By deliberately ignoring these facts, it seems that you are the one pushing an agenda by trying to hide the facts.
If the office is at all funded with tax payer money then it seems like a pretty clear violation to me.
Well, then, that seems to point to the fact that you are wrong. You need to look at the reason for the amendment and the statement to understand what it means. As another poster has pointed out, simply claiming "separation of church and state" (which is not found therein) is so vague a statement that it can run from "government cannot use the word 'god' in anything" all the way to "cannot establish a state church" (which is what it really means).
You might notice that at no time in history has the former interpretation been valid, even the day after the amendment was adopted by the very people who wrote it. I need nothing more than that knowledge to know that a ridiculously limited interpretation is wrong.
I'm all for freedom to live your life the way you want and all that. But for the *state* to openly exploit its citizens with these parasitic lotteries makes my stomach turn.
I'm all for the state allowing its citizens (and those from neighboring states) to voluntarily donate their money to pay for state services on the off-chance that those citizens will get a good payout, rather than have the state take money by force from everyone to pay for things that not everyone wants or uses.
It is hard to call someone doing something totally voluntarily as "being exploited", since all they would need to do to stop being exploited is ... not do it.
If you call this "exploitation", then you must also view the voluntary exchange of money for sex ("prostitution") as a serious crime, since you can argue that one side is exploiting the other.
Aside from the assertion the card, why do you think it would be bad ?
I think the promise of the government not to do something when they are trying to get rid of objections to that process should be sufficient to make it a bad idea on its face.
Beyond that, we're into a discussion of the idea of a national ID card, which is arguably bad, and not an argument I want to get into today.