So why are they almost universally opposed to gay mariage?
That question has nothing to do with your claim that Christians hate homosexuals. It's like saying that Christians hate apple farmers because some of them don't like apples.
How is forcing your religious or moral views on others NOT the embodiment of hatred?
Let's be specific here. How have I forced my religious view upon you today? Or even during the last week? My moral views? How does my support for a legal status that grants spousal privileges but that isn't called "marriage" force anything upon you? How is demanding that I accept a homosexual "marriage" not forcing a moral viewpoint upon me?
Do you view the laws against murder as being based in hate? Do you view the laws against theft as hate-originated? Those are embodiments of moral codes. If you are going to reply that those are SERIOUS things and hyperbole, then let's deal with laws like trespassing and nudity. Those are moral decisions forced upon you. Is it a hate-crime to arrest you for being inside my house without my permission?
I'll further point out the hypocritical nature of your position, in that we are told every time there is an "Islamic fundamentalist terrorist act" that is it wrong to ascribe malice to an entire group over the acts of an individual (or 19 of them), and yet "Christians" are guilty of "hating homosexuals" because a few of them do, or of hate crimes in general based on the Crusades that happened centuries ago.
It is almost inevitable that every time someone mentions that the Koran contains passages that talk about killing the non-believers the name "Timothy McVeigh" will come up, as if the act of one nutjob really ought to brand a very large and diverse group with his guilt.
Yes, I know this is not the place for a debate about gay marriage, but let me ask this. If the sacrament of marriage really isn't that special (the response that gays make when faced with the "it's a special thing" argument) then why isn't a civil union that grants the same legal protections and responsibilities sufficient? That is what mystifies me, and I'm sure a lot of others.
If the whole thing gets tossed, what will actually happen is that health care will be too toxic a topic to touch for another twenty years. Politicians aren't in the business of governing, they're in the business of winning elections.
Which is pretty much an admission that the majority of people are opposed to this legislation. If the pols don't think that fixing this legislation is going to win them elections, then they must know that the people they allegedly represent don't actually want it.
Not really. Again....You may make your life easier with a car, but it is not required like oxygen, water and food.
They are taxing you on life now.
In our small part of the planet, we've had taxes on our water for quite awhile now. And we're getting more.
We used to be paying just for street repairs with the water tax. Now we're providing free bus service and free sidewalk repairs and something else I forget at the moment. Nothing to do with water, however.
On the other hand, you could argue that I need not be connected to the city water supply, but I think there is a law requiring that even though I have a "crick" in my backyard I could draw water from.
Not every citizen in California is required to have auto insurance. Only those who want to drive.
And further, the insurance required does not protect the driver, only the people he may kill or maim or destroy the property of in an accident. It's liability insurance.
That's a nice thought, but they aren't challenging "every little thing" the government does, they only challenge things they don't like, and there aren't a similar number of "flaming crazies" challenging other laws that other americans view as blatantly unconstitutional or imposing on freedom.
I see. So because the crazies you don't like don't challenge the laws you don't like, they are bad, but when the crazies you do like challenge laws I do like, they are good?
Your answer to the problem of not enough people challenging enough things is to insult and denigrate those who are standing up for the Constitution? That's a really good way to get more people doing it, you know. While your personal condemnation and vitriolic insults are probably irrelevant to them, it does show a bit of a bias on your part.
If this were a case about a law requiring everyone to purchase a Bible, these same people would be actively supporting the law or at least remaining silent,
I call "bullshit". Deal with what the people you don't like are actually doing instead of making it up so you can spew more hate at them. If you don't like them opposing a patently unconstitutional law, write your congressman to get him to pass constitutional ones. Insulting them for having principles you don't agree with is just stupid and ignorant, and basically intolerant.
I've heard stories of one individual completely stumped when he ran out of desk space but couldn't move the mouse cursor any more to the right than the middle of the screen. Clearly he didn't realise that you pick the mouse up...
A user interface that requires you to keep picking up the pointing device to have full range is as stupid as a UI that makes you keep moving your hand back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard. It's inefficient and annoying. The mouse issue means you are making the same movements with different results. Move it while on the desk, cursor moves. Then you have to move it BACK the opposite way and the cursor doesn't move...
I got so tired of this with my limited desk space that I switched to a trackball. Everywhere. Small movements of my thumb give complete control of the cursor. The Logitech Trackman -- great product. But it's getting hard to find them anymore.
Really? Run an equity into the ground in clear violation of untold number of regulations and reward the owner.
A. It wasn't the owner who ran it into the ground. The owner obeyed regulations.
B. It isn't a reward by any means when the government takes a cash-producing property from someone and then pays them "fair market value", even if they pay as much as fair market value is. Try buying a replacement property with the "fair market value" the guvmint is going to pay you.
I think the government should allow each airline to offer, say, 50 flights per day in which you don't have to go through all the security theater. That way people can take a calculated risk on whether they want to be molested, photographed nude, or none of the above.
The problem with that is that so many of the flights today are overbooked that you would still have no choice in the matter. I.e., the chance of getting a seat on one of the 50 flights would be so miniscule that you would have to take a groped flight if you want to get where you are going. And you may very well have to take an ungroped flight if you want to travel because you got bumped off a groped one.
My objection holds anywhere from "50 per day" to "50% per day". Once you get above 50%, those who want absolute safety will start complaining because they will become more likely to not get it.
That, and fifty flights a day would hardly cover anywhere near the amount of destinations that people want to travel to, so people who want to travel someplace where those flights don't go (or don't originate from) would still be stuck.
Overall, your idea is bad because it is a placebo that would have the TSA saying "you can choose, so we don't have to stop." I'd rather they simply stop because they have to.
In the Intro to Digital Design course (6.004) students, do, in fact, build CPUs from relays and piano wire, as it were.
Pure luxury. In my college, we had to produce our own coke to smelt the copper ore to produce the wire and bits to make relays by hand, and THEN we got to program them in BINARY -- we didn't have a "machine language" until senior year.
Unless these MIT folks are extruding their own wire, I'm not impressed.
The highlight of the 1976 or so Michigan State University Computer Science "Engineering Day" display was a large Calcomp plotter playing show tunes. This was a huge monster plotter, but it did a great Liza Minnelli.
To date another technology, a different display showed a very early version of the Votrax voice encoder from Federal Screw Works, and how the students had programmed it to call the local pizza place and order a pizza.
We don't have privacy because we don't deserve it. We must accept that we are peasants to large financial institutions. They own our souls.
You don't have privacy because you agreed to the terms and conditions when you accepted the credit card offer from the "large financial institution.". They didn't have to give you credit, and you didn't have to take it when they offered. It was your choice.
Similarly, you don't have privacy at the grocery store because you accepted the terms and conditions of that "club card" when they offered it. They didn't have to offer it to you, and you didn't have to accept. You have to know they're getting something FROM you when they let you buy their stuff for less money when you have that card. Why do you think they do that, because they are altruistic and nice and like you?
But instead of taking care of, you know, problems....
You clearly don't understand the concept of the tourism industry. Maybe you are right about your education system.
This is not, as someone else claimed, an investment in religion. It is an investment in the state's tourism industry.
You know, like, when people come into the state from outside, stop at the park (which will employ people, thus helping the "low unemployment [sic]" and increasing the tax base), buy gas from a local gas station, maybe stay at a local motel. They eat at local restaurants, buy a newspaper to read in the morning (if the "worst education" state produces anything halfway literate in the way of newspapers, that is).
In other words, by creating an attraction you draw outside money in. I forget the "official" number, but it's something like every dollar spent in a community results in 7 dollars of effect. (Someone pays a dollar to get in to the park, that dollar goes into someone's salary, that salary is spent at the local grocery store, the grocery store pays a local produce vender, the farmer buys gas for his tractor, etc...).
You don't like the topic, well that's fine. You don't have to go there. I don't particularly like Van Gogh or other stuff that passes for art these days, but I don't say "close the galleries". That would be closed-minded and intolerant.
He's correct that 'blog' is short for 'web log', but completely wrong in thinking 'web log' means the logs a web server keeps, in this context.
A "web log" is the log kept by a web server. It may also mean something else to other people, but IMNSHO that meaning is incorrect when applied in the context of a web service. And also completely irrelevant to the point I made, which doesn't depend on whether you call slashdot a 'blog', a 'discussion board', a 'masturbation aid' or even 'cheese.'
The point is the intended purpose for whatever you call this place, which isn't "unceasing gratuitous bashing of any convenient disliked target", and I'm expressing my opinion that it is disappointing and depressing to see it continue ad nauseum.
You don't have to travel millions of light-years to see that atoms behave in the same way - you can use spectroscopy.
No. You can measure the spectrum of the light that has reached us, but you cannot "use spectroscopy" on those atoms. A trivial example: light from distant galaxies passes through gaseous regions of space. If you assume that the light you see is the same as the light emitted directly, you'd be seriously wrong. Or, if you observe the light from a black body radiator that has passed through a gas that you didn't know was there, you'd be inclined to think the absorption bands you see were from the source. That would be wrong.
You seek certainty. That only exists in theory. In practice, we know the laws of physics are universal, for all practical purposes, for the reasons I mentioned. If that isn't good enough for you, stick with divinity school. Science is not for you.
I'd say exactly the opposite is true. You speak of "knowing" when the truth is you "believe" based on assumptions about things you can't actually measure. It is the use of "know" that is a misapplied search for certainty.
The question is quite valid. It is entirely possible that we are in some region of space where the laws of physics are warped, just like we learned late in the game that gravity warps space and light actually doesn't travel in a straight line all the time. Or some other part of space is in such a warped field, which would also contradict the claim that "physics is universal."
I'd say that scientists who throw about terms like "know" and then get upset when lay people assume they meant "know" and not "hypothesize" are the ones in the wrong here. It takes effort to refrain from saying "we know" and instead say "we think" or "evidence suggests", but in the long run it prevents a LOT of miscommunication and misunderstandings.
Maybe its just an early experience in the criminal justice system (on the prosecution side) that makes me aware of this problem. Any prosecution witness who says "I know" when they mean "the evidence suggests" would have his head handed to him by the defense, and then the prosecutors when the case goes south. Science is no different.
I'm not an explosive expert either, but I worked with enough of them in Iraq to say you're pretty much dead on. Actually disarming a device is reserved for situations where you can't or don't have time to evacuate the area.
The other reason to disarm instead of detonate is so you can study the methods being used to make the bomb and maybe trace the source.
I was at the Dayton Hamvention (amateur radio swapmeet) two years ago and there was a booth from a spook outfit looking for electronics engineers. They wanted people who could reverse engineer the electronics used in IEDs. That meant using x-rays and electron microscopy of the chips used to build the things, since many of them would have the markings ground off.
It sounded like a fascinating job, until they said that the people they hired would be rotating into Iraq and Afghanistan to work with the military units that were disarming the bombs for six months at a time.
Some guy forgets his luggage on the side of the road as he rushes to make a flight on time, are we going to call the bomb squad?
Happens all the time and there's a TSA agent nearby to make that judgment call.
Sheesh, I wish TSA agents were on the roadsides collecting lost luggage instead of making porn pictures and feeling up grannies and children. Much more productive, and we wouldn't have to risk escape from all the felons on county work crews when they go out to pick up the trash.
But really, how many people lose their luggage on the side of the road while driving to the airport? You'd kinda have to stop, open the trunk, and dump the luggage, and that would be hard to forget you'd done, wouldn't it?
On my planet, "blog" is short for "web log", and I have been maintaining at least one since about 1992. Whenever it was the earliest web servers came out. (It was, in the beginning, mostly a mirror of my gopherspace.) It kept a log: every request, every failed request, etc. I now have about four websites. Each one has an accesslog and an errorlog, and one has both a master accesslog and a daily rotated accesslog (which makes several thousand "blogs" accumulated over the years.) So, if you want to be extremely pedantic, this isn't a 'blog' at all. I have, however, given up wasting time pointing this fact out to everyone who arrived late and thinks a "web log" is what this is.
Realistically, the point had nothing to do with what you call this forum, so questioning that term while ignoring the point is, well, normal for this blog.
If you actually have a medical problem, it's not "insurance". It's welfare. You've paid nothing into the system and have everyone else paying for your treatments.
It's not so much that terrorists have won, but much more that police departments get paid more for envisioning ever more over-reactionary and retarded ways to respond to things.
No, it's more like police departments will get excoriated if they miss just one real event out of all the possibilities, so to keep being paid they react to things in the safest way possible.
It's because "absolute safety" is the mantra of the sheep who think they are owed absolute safety in life, and have been taught by someone that it is possible to achieve.
You know, it gets a bit old and stale, and quite a bit tiring, for this gratuitous political-based bashing, here in a blog intended for "news that matters" for "nerds".
It's depressing to come to a discussion about some new discovery in science just to find a long and boring thread with Bush (or Obama) bashing as the goal.
Slashdot Mirror
That question has nothing to do with your claim that Christians hate homosexuals. It's like saying that Christians hate apple farmers because some of them don't like apples.
How is forcing your religious or moral views on others NOT the embodiment of hatred?
Let's be specific here. How have I forced my religious view upon you today? Or even during the last week? My moral views? How does my support for a legal status that grants spousal privileges but that isn't called "marriage" force anything upon you? How is demanding that I accept a homosexual "marriage" not forcing a moral viewpoint upon me?
Do you view the laws against murder as being based in hate? Do you view the laws against theft as hate-originated? Those are embodiments of moral codes. If you are going to reply that those are SERIOUS things and hyperbole, then let's deal with laws like trespassing and nudity. Those are moral decisions forced upon you. Is it a hate-crime to arrest you for being inside my house without my permission?
I'll further point out the hypocritical nature of your position, in that we are told every time there is an "Islamic fundamentalist terrorist act" that is it wrong to ascribe malice to an entire group over the acts of an individual (or 19 of them), and yet "Christians" are guilty of "hating homosexuals" because a few of them do, or of hate crimes in general based on the Crusades that happened centuries ago.
It is almost inevitable that every time someone mentions that the Koran contains passages that talk about killing the non-believers the name "Timothy McVeigh" will come up, as if the act of one nutjob really ought to brand a very large and diverse group with his guilt.
Yes, I know this is not the place for a debate about gay marriage, but let me ask this. If the sacrament of marriage really isn't that special (the response that gays make when faced with the "it's a special thing" argument) then why isn't a civil union that grants the same legal protections and responsibilities sufficient? That is what mystifies me, and I'm sure a lot of others.
Which is pretty much an admission that the majority of people are opposed to this legislation. If the pols don't think that fixing this legislation is going to win them elections, then they must know that the people they allegedly represent don't actually want it.
In our small part of the planet, we've had taxes on our water for quite awhile now. And we're getting more.
We used to be paying just for street repairs with the water tax. Now we're providing free bus service and free sidewalk repairs and something else I forget at the moment. Nothing to do with water, however.
On the other hand, you could argue that I need not be connected to the city water supply, but I think there is a law requiring that even though I have a "crick" in my backyard I could draw water from.
And further, the insurance required does not protect the driver, only the people he may kill or maim or destroy the property of in an accident. It's liability insurance.
They don't. Next question?
I see. So because the crazies you don't like don't challenge the laws you don't like, they are bad, but when the crazies you do like challenge laws I do like, they are good?
Your answer to the problem of not enough people challenging enough things is to insult and denigrate those who are standing up for the Constitution? That's a really good way to get more people doing it, you know. While your personal condemnation and vitriolic insults are probably irrelevant to them, it does show a bit of a bias on your part.
If this were a case about a law requiring everyone to purchase a Bible, these same people would be actively supporting the law or at least remaining silent,
I call "bullshit". Deal with what the people you don't like are actually doing instead of making it up so you can spew more hate at them. If you don't like them opposing a patently unconstitutional law, write your congressman to get him to pass constitutional ones. Insulting them for having principles you don't agree with is just stupid and ignorant, and basically intolerant.
A user interface that requires you to keep picking up the pointing device to have full range is as stupid as a UI that makes you keep moving your hand back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard. It's inefficient and annoying. The mouse issue means you are making the same movements with different results. Move it while on the desk, cursor moves. Then you have to move it BACK the opposite way and the cursor doesn't move...
I got so tired of this with my limited desk space that I switched to a trackball. Everywhere. Small movements of my thumb give complete control of the cursor. The Logitech Trackman -- great product. But it's getting hard to find them anymore.
A. It wasn't the owner who ran it into the ground. The owner obeyed regulations.
B. It isn't a reward by any means when the government takes a cash-producing property from someone and then pays them "fair market value", even if they pay as much as fair market value is. Try buying a replacement property with the "fair market value" the guvmint is going to pay you.
Yes, I knew those Chik-fil-a cows were up to something. It's not just a cute ad slogan, they're out enforcing it!
The problem with that is that so many of the flights today are overbooked that you would still have no choice in the matter. I.e., the chance of getting a seat on one of the 50 flights would be so miniscule that you would have to take a groped flight if you want to get where you are going. And you may very well have to take an ungroped flight if you want to travel because you got bumped off a groped one.
My objection holds anywhere from "50 per day" to "50% per day". Once you get above 50%, those who want absolute safety will start complaining because they will become more likely to not get it.
That, and fifty flights a day would hardly cover anywhere near the amount of destinations that people want to travel to, so people who want to travel someplace where those flights don't go (or don't originate from) would still be stuck.
Overall, your idea is bad because it is a placebo that would have the TSA saying "you can choose, so we don't have to stop." I'd rather they simply stop because they have to.
Pure luxury. In my college, we had to produce our own coke to smelt the copper ore to produce the wire and bits to make relays by hand, and THEN we got to program them in BINARY -- we didn't have a "machine language" until senior year.
Unless these MIT folks are extruding their own wire, I'm not impressed.
To date another technology, a different display showed a very early version of the Votrax voice encoder from Federal Screw Works, and how the students had programmed it to call the local pizza place and order a pizza.
You don't have privacy because you agreed to the terms and conditions when you accepted the credit card offer from the "large financial institution.". They didn't have to give you credit, and you didn't have to take it when they offered. It was your choice.
Similarly, you don't have privacy at the grocery store because you accepted the terms and conditions of that "club card" when they offered it. They didn't have to offer it to you, and you didn't have to accept. You have to know they're getting something FROM you when they let you buy their stuff for less money when you have that card. Why do you think they do that, because they are altruistic and nice and like you?
You clearly don't understand the concept of the tourism industry. Maybe you are right about your education system.
This is not, as someone else claimed, an investment in religion. It is an investment in the state's tourism industry.
You know, like, when people come into the state from outside, stop at the park (which will employ people, thus helping the "low unemployment [sic]" and increasing the tax base), buy gas from a local gas station, maybe stay at a local motel. They eat at local restaurants, buy a newspaper to read in the morning (if the "worst education" state produces anything halfway literate in the way of newspapers, that is).
In other words, by creating an attraction you draw outside money in. I forget the "official" number, but it's something like every dollar spent in a community results in 7 dollars of effect. (Someone pays a dollar to get in to the park, that dollar goes into someone's salary, that salary is spent at the local grocery store, the grocery store pays a local produce vender, the farmer buys gas for his tractor, etc...).
You don't like the topic, well that's fine. You don't have to go there. I don't particularly like Van Gogh or other stuff that passes for art these days, but I don't say "close the galleries". That would be closed-minded and intolerant.
A "web log" is the log kept by a web server. It may also mean something else to other people, but IMNSHO that meaning is incorrect when applied in the context of a web service. And also completely irrelevant to the point I made, which doesn't depend on whether you call slashdot a 'blog', a 'discussion board', a 'masturbation aid' or even 'cheese.'
The point is the intended purpose for whatever you call this place, which isn't "unceasing gratuitous bashing of any convenient disliked target", and I'm expressing my opinion that it is disappointing and depressing to see it continue ad nauseum.
No. You can measure the spectrum of the light that has reached us, but you cannot "use spectroscopy" on those atoms. A trivial example: light from distant galaxies passes through gaseous regions of space. If you assume that the light you see is the same as the light emitted directly, you'd be seriously wrong. Or, if you observe the light from a black body radiator that has passed through a gas that you didn't know was there, you'd be inclined to think the absorption bands you see were from the source. That would be wrong.
I'd say exactly the opposite is true. You speak of "knowing" when the truth is you "believe" based on assumptions about things you can't actually measure. It is the use of "know" that is a misapplied search for certainty.
The question is quite valid. It is entirely possible that we are in some region of space where the laws of physics are warped, just like we learned late in the game that gravity warps space and light actually doesn't travel in a straight line all the time. Or some other part of space is in such a warped field, which would also contradict the claim that "physics is universal."
I'd say that scientists who throw about terms like "know" and then get upset when lay people assume they meant "know" and not "hypothesize" are the ones in the wrong here. It takes effort to refrain from saying "we know" and instead say "we think" or "evidence suggests", but in the long run it prevents a LOT of miscommunication and misunderstandings.
Maybe its just an early experience in the criminal justice system (on the prosecution side) that makes me aware of this problem. Any prosecution witness who says "I know" when they mean "the evidence suggests" would have his head handed to him by the defense, and then the prosecutors when the case goes south. Science is no different.
That would violate EPA rules against lead exposure levels. Too much Chinese lead paint on those toys.
The other reason to disarm instead of detonate is so you can study the methods being used to make the bomb and maybe trace the source.
I was at the Dayton Hamvention (amateur radio swapmeet) two years ago and there was a booth from a spook outfit looking for electronics engineers. They wanted people who could reverse engineer the electronics used in IEDs. That meant using x-rays and electron microscopy of the chips used to build the things, since many of them would have the markings ground off.
It sounded like a fascinating job, until they said that the people they hired would be rotating into Iraq and Afghanistan to work with the military units that were disarming the bombs for six months at a time.
Sheesh, I wish TSA agents were on the roadsides collecting lost luggage instead of making porn pictures and feeling up grannies and children. Much more productive, and we wouldn't have to risk escape from all the felons on county work crews when they go out to pick up the trash.
But really, how many people lose their luggage on the side of the road while driving to the airport? You'd kinda have to stop, open the trunk, and dump the luggage, and that would be hard to forget you'd done, wouldn't it?
On my planet, "blog" is short for "web log", and I have been maintaining at least one since about 1992. Whenever it was the earliest web servers came out. (It was, in the beginning, mostly a mirror of my gopherspace.) It kept a log: every request, every failed request, etc. I now have about four websites. Each one has an accesslog and an errorlog, and one has both a master accesslog and a daily rotated accesslog (which makes several thousand "blogs" accumulated over the years.) So, if you want to be extremely pedantic, this isn't a 'blog' at all. I have, however, given up wasting time pointing this fact out to everyone who arrived late and thinks a "web log" is what this is.
Realistically, the point had nothing to do with what you call this forum, so questioning that term while ignoring the point is, well, normal for this blog.
"Likely to develop" is another story.
No, it's more like police departments will get excoriated if they miss just one real event out of all the possibilities, so to keep being paid they react to things in the safest way possible.
It's because "absolute safety" is the mantra of the sheep who think they are owed absolute safety in life, and have been taught by someone that it is possible to achieve.
The police closed the street and called in the bomb squad.
It's depressing to come to a discussion about some new discovery in science just to find a long and boring thread with Bush (or Obama) bashing as the goal.