For example, the first one could be a folder named “thankscnet.{00C6D95F-329C-409a-81D7-C46C66EA7F33}”
Also, a response further down in blog comments:
Yeah, sure. your post: 1/7/2010 @ 10:09 am cnet’s post: January 6, 2010 12:04 PM PST
There appears to be a lot of plagiarism going on there. I googled text from several other posts and every single one matched something written previously elsewhere.
While it is hard to put a monetary value on environmental damage, its obviously not $0. If an industry is making money damaging the environment, that may be fine, but some of the money really should go to everyone living in the damaged environment.
So then...the tax levied in MN should be paid out in SD and wherever else the plants are? Something tells me that won't be as easy to push through the SD legislature...
That should read, "This is like putting a tax on wood cut in a sawmill in ND (or any other state including MN) because there is asbestos in the sawmills insulation." But that analogy is inaccurate because in the real case the greenhouse gases are a consequence of the method of power generation, whereas the sawmill doesn't create more asbestos every time they cut wood.
The core question seems to be, "Can the means for producing a good be regulated when the end product is identical?" If we look at child labor as a parallel example, the answer to my knowledge appears to be "no," since laws preventing sweatshops in the US do not prevent the sale of sweatshop-made goods produced elsewhere. Yet if Wikipedia is to be trusted, California and several other states have "passed bills requiring performance-based regulation of greenhouse gases from electricity generation," so at the very least there is some inconsistency.
I'm not convinced either way. Perhaps a car analogy is in order.
California has stricter emissions standards for automobiles, most of which are not manufactured in CA itself. The only difference between cars allowed for sale in CA and cars that aren't is the level of emissions they...er...emit. The utility (getting from point A to point B) is identical, it is the external cost of greenhouse gases that are regulated against.
It should be noted that, according to Wikipedia's Emission Standard article, California "faces a court challenge from the federal government," and though it doesn't go into detail one would presume that the logic in play is similar. Also from the same article, "California and several other western states have passed bills requiring performance-based regulation of greenhouse gases from electricity generation," so this doesn't appear to be a novel idea. There are no references for it, so I can't speak to its truth or how contested the existing laws are. Perhaps someone living in one of those states can provide more information.
Is it just me, or did the government claim in Raich that consuming your own marijuana affects the interstate marijuana trade and that causes your marijuana or personal consumption to become interstate commerce? Is the government really trying to say that if I use marijuana I grow myself that I am hurting people who are importing marijuana? I know I must have read that wrong.
Nope, you read it right. It's the court that is wrong, and absurdly so. I recommend a read of Justice Thomas' dissenting opinion--it's pretty scathing and spot-on.
There's also documentation of the temperatures being collected in all sorts of places that don't fit the guidelines for where they should be placed - such as some that have been found placed directly under the vent from a buildings furnace.
Which is why you automatically eliminate bad stations, something you were just criticizing the CRU for doing, re. Russia.
I ask this as a curious outsider, not an adversary: what are the criteria for considering a station to be "bad"? Some would certainly be obvious, like an average temperature jump of 10 degrees overnight, but I'm having trouble imagining a winnowing process that adequately controls for selection bias.
In a single day, 20 some odd yahoos cost the US economy several hundred billions of dollars.
and now you write
In just a single day, the terrorists inflected between $1 trillion and $3 trillion.
neither of which is sourced. So...did you look at costofwar.com and revise your figure upward to support your conclusion? Because that's what it looks like to everyone else.
The cost of the two wars to our economy is also higher than costofwar reports. Much war spending goes into the pockets of the military-industrial complex and so gets recycled in our economy, but there are costs for expendable items (explosives, bullets) that essentially disappear. And then there are all those specially-built vehicles that we built for Iraq and can't use in Afghanistan, and they're not exactly useful back in the States to drive the kids to school in either. Fuel is burned up, not helping us in the long run. Lives are ended, more than the terrorists took.
And then there's the fact that war is not security and is in fact bad for it. Every innocent killed in "collateral damage" results in another potentially radicalized brother or father. We increase the supply of terrorists we're supposed to be eradicating.
Reacting is good. Overreacting, what the US has done, is more dangerous to the US than doing nothing.
Security should be up to the airlines. If the market dictates that peopel will choose to board a plane with no security, then so be it.
This is the most sensible thing I've read all year! Granted, we're only 5 days in, but it's a good start. I would be much more willing to fly if I didn't have to go through an onerous, time-consuming, and mostly pointless screening process. The only problem is, so would the terrorists! You can bet that if there were security-free airlines and another attack on a plane, it would be on one of the security-free planes. If that happened, my bet is that the airline company would crash along with the plane.
I agree that security should be up to the airlines, but I think better than a plane with no security is a plane with a kind of security other than passenger screening. Sky marshals come to mind immediately. I'm sure others have additional ideas. We'd end up with some airlines using full-body scans, for the safety-obsessed privacy-be-damned crowd, others using some combination of x-rayed carry-ons and metal detectors for most regular Joes, and a few rogues with no screening and maybe no security at all.
More dangerous, yet less onerous. There's a lesson here. Whenever someone brings up the necessity for invasive security screening at airports, they should be reminded of the relative dangers of automobiles. I don't have the stats offhand, but it's common knowledge, as you wrote, that you're much more likely to die in an auto collision than any terrorist attack (not just limited to planes).
More significantly, there is nothing we can realistically do to reduce the risk of death in an auto collision to anywhere near the risk of death by terrorist attack. Sure, we have driver's licenses, but there is necessarily too much autonomy for auto drivers to be "safe" by the rigorous standard applied to airline passengers. That autonomy combined with bad judgment and human error means getting into a car is very risky behavior when compared to getting on a plane, even with no security screening whatsoever.
Logically, then, people who advocate current and increased security measures for airline passengers should never set foot in an automobile because it is too dangerous. I have not had the opportunity to confront anyone with this reasoning, but I would be interested to see how they would respond. I don't think it would change anyone's mind by itself, but it could lead to interesting discussion of acceptable risk and convenience, and hopefully get them to rethink their assumptions.
The West is their enemy. We could pull out entirely right now and we'd still be the Great Satan for generations and generations.
True--among radicals. Most people in the middle east just want to live their lives in peace. When that peace is interrupted by American bombs, the guys saying that America must be destroyed look less like nutjobs. Bin Laden has written that he wants the US to come to his country and rack up collateral damage because it will bankrupt the US while giving OBL an increasing supply of willing suicide bombers, people who would otherwise write him off as insane.
In short, the terrorists are winning because they are achieving their goals. It's a lot more work for them to train and send people over here to cause a few deaths than it is to let our country devour itself in an excessive reaction.
"This device is insecure" is too weak. "YOU'VE BEEN HACKED" in big red letters with further details below is the way to go. Eye-catching, and likely to get a response, especially if there's a number to call--keep in mind that most people are more comfortable with phones than the internets.
Putting goatse on there is irresponsible and unhelpful, especially in cases where the person who set up the channel is not the person displaying the frame (think grandma). Don't try to dress up your lulz as something they're not.
Neither of those (I believe the second two links are showing the same interface) are at all close to what the GP is looking for. The first is closer, in the same way that a 6-foot tall man is closer to passing clouds than a 5-foot tall man. I'm not sure exactly what the mechanics are behind the system in the first video, and the author's site isn't very informative, but it looks like it might be symbol-based; that is, he thinks "D3" hard enough and the system picks up on it.
The second links read brainwaves, and a computer decides what to play based on their levels...it's more like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book than writing your own.
If GP is looking for anything like I am looking for, though I highly doubt it will ever happen, the system should essentially be able to play back any sound that the user imagines, from a nuanced trumpet solo to a full orchestra to a pop song heard on the radio to interesting noise. Such a system would necessarily include thought-to-speech, and that's a hell of a long way off as well--unless like the writers of the article you consider 3 vowel sounds to constitute speech.
Exactly. People tend to forget that the analysis of a natural language necessarily comes after the language itself, and often mistake the descriptive system for a prescriptive one. Classification of language parts is useful, since it's easier to learn and remember things that are structured, but there will always be outliers and unsettled areas. The differences among described language systems highlight this.
And no, there is no need for the government to decree things. There is no need for the government to set prices. Under option 2, people would pay what they could afford. Prices would adjust naturally. If we simply mandated government balanced budgets, this would handle their end as well.
Would you believe that I had originally written something related to this, but deleted it to remove politics from my response? I am in full agreement with you here.
It looked to me like you were advocating "equal pay for all occupations" as a means to achieve the Utopian end rather than providing a description of the end itself, but your response cleared that up. I agree that a bachelor's degree shouldn't be necessary for med school, and other inefficiencies exist as well. I wonder if all the certifications required for teaching are necessary...one would think that a well-thought-out application process would let only good teachers through. Not having gone through it myself, I can't speak from experience.
Option 2 results in more individual freedom, which I deem valuable, and I think the chances of being bitten by unintended consequences by following option 1 are much higher. I think my misunderstanding is a result of the apparent contradiction between "no need for the government to decree things" and "regulated profession upon those in the private sector."
No scheme of inequality can be defended as corresponding to natural fact.... Superior and inferior can be determined only with respect to a single quality for a single purpose. Nor can a man's qualities be added together and averaged to give a final score or merit. In short, men are incommensurable and must be deemed equal. - Jacques Barzun
As good private sector jobs (auto-workers, engineers...) go away, that high-end tax base drops as well.
That's not strictly true. When jobs are outsourced or automated, the people at the top of the company make bigger profits by using cheaper labor and the people at the bottom are out of work. Money that used to be dispersed in the local economy ends up in the higher-ups' pockets, pulling at the gap between rich and poor from both ends.
So the payment to the public sector should drop as well. There is no intrinsic reason a teacher should earn more than a waitress. I know I'd rather be a teacher than a fast food server. I've been both:)
Then you know how much more expensive it is, in both time and money, to become a teacher. Lots of people wouldn't be able to take that career path without being paid much more than a fast food server just to get out of school debt. (As an aside, the fast food server will likely be one of the first jobs to be automated in the coming years.) I like the utopia represented by The Australia Project in Manna as much as the next guy, but the path from *here* to *there* is not at all straightforward. You can't just declare "all jobs now pay the same, pick one" and expect the needs of the country to be met, even with a lot of automation. It would take a level of techne that still very much resides only in science fiction before such a move would be possible, and you'd face fierce opposition from the rich, who have the means to fight you every step of the way.
And we would all be able to have more 'stuff' as things would cost very little.
This already happens; it's just too slow for most of us to notice because we're so attuned to computing advancements, which happen quite rapidly. Most products either get cheaper over time or stay the same price while improving their specs. Inflation also must be taken into account. The process takes decades, but a lot of these items are durable goods, so it's not as slow as it sounds.
Ooh! What they need is a variety of uniforms depending on the task currently at hand! Working on a server outage? Put on the fireman outfit. Users not obeying your policies? Policeman. Laying cable or moving computers around? Cleaner. Spyware removal? Nurse. Coding? Scientist.
The Judge uniform should of course be used in all meetings, because any psychological trick to get management to actually listen to the IT department should be exploited to the fullest.
6Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but like slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. 7Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men, 8because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free.
9And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.
I'd get into the cultural differences between slavery in the time of Christ and slavery in more recent times, but again, I don't really have a dog in this fight and you're just a troll.
[Gamers] are, for the most part, people who actually *think*. A religious game targeted at this group would make no sense, as many of the responses to this story have demonstrated.
Looks to me like most of the responses in this discussion have mischaracterized religion, ranging the spectrum from "religion is an evil, controlling, worthless fairy-tale" to "religion is the only reason we act ethically." The reality is a lot more complex, and IMO the closest analogue to religions are political parties--convenient ways for people of similar beliefs to congregate and shape the world. They do both good and evil, there are hundreds of different reasons for joining one, and people in other ones construct different conclusions given the same information.
I agree that video games aren't a good medium for handling religion though, because it's such a wide-ranging yet nuanced topic; the same goes for philosophy. You could do a game that promotes a particular view of a particular religion, and that's been done many times before. Lots of games have some religion, actual or fictional, as part of their setting, and it helps to give texture to the game world. But aside from something like Bible Adventures (preaching to the choir, and not very well) or the RPG someone mentioned that highlights how corrupt a church can be, it doesn't seem to me that there's a whole lot you can do to get people to really think about religion using a video game. IMO the same goes for classical arts like painting and sculpture, though my knowledge of those is admittedly weak.
The best way to get people to think about religion is through discussion and literature. Essays and books allow the author time and space to lay out his thoughts, and discussion allows new perspectives to challenge or expand existing views. Film can be used much in the same way as literature, but video games often (must) give the user too much freedom to have the intellectual punch of a good film. The problem is that religions and philosophies spur people to take certain actions. Games, with their focus on action (be it fighting or allocating resources or passing laws or what have you) can't play with the thought process that leads to the action--and that thought process is where philosophy and religion reside.
Of course I could be wrong. Someone might come up with a way to take the thought process into account, and I would find it immensely interesting to play such a game, but I think in this case the medium is the wrong shape for the content.
I shouldn't be getting involved in this stuff, but it pisses me off when quotes of a vengeful God from the Old Testament is trotted out to "disprove" some aspect of Christianity.
The Old Testament is present in Christian Bibles because it is part of Christian history--Jesus came out of Jewish culture, and the Old Testament is a collection of Jewish texts. Much of Jesus' teaching relied on knowledge of those texts because it gave him a starting point to expand on or to look at in a new way. If you can find some quotes in the New Testament to back up your argument, then you might give the Christians here something to chew on. The whole reason Jesus wasn't accepted by most followers of Judaism is because he was not the vengeful, war-mongering, state-overthrowing Messiah they expected. I don't think you'll have any luck finding orders for Christians to kill people in the New Testament.
Now, having said that, your point isn't invalidated: there is a problem with the label of "Christian." What it ought to refer to is "a person who follows the teachings of Christ," in which case the poster you're responding to is correct--killing people for not being Christians is against the teachings of Christ, so they are not Christians. But at this point in time, "Christian" refers to someone who is part of the Christian church, or someone who claims to be part of the Christian church. Since the church regularly takes part in actions that are against the teachings of Christ, it ought not to bear the "Christian" name, but there's no practical way to change that, and so your (and others') assertion that "by definition" rings false is true.
I myself have sidestepped the issue by no longer proclaiming myself a Christian, and instead letting my actions tell others what kind of person I am. I dislike getting involved in this stuff on/. because there's far too much animosity, and the Christian church deserves a lot of the criticism it gets, but if there's going to be debate it should at least be honest and informed.
Slashdot Mirror
"Rethink" is different from and more rigorous than "change." ;)
Why would Aviran use this?
For example, the first one could be a folder named “thankscnet.{00C6D95F-329C-409a-81D7-C46C66EA7F33}”
Also, a response further down in blog comments:
Yeah, sure.
your post: 1/7/2010 @ 10:09 am
cnet’s post: January 6, 2010 12:04 PM PST
There appears to be a lot of plagiarism going on there. I googled text from several other posts and every single one matched something written previously elsewhere.
Tsk tsk.
Yep, another name for the 'foes' list. One-click for your convenience!
While it is hard to put a monetary value on environmental damage, its obviously not $0. If an industry is making money damaging the environment, that may be fine, but some of the money really should go to everyone living in the damaged environment.
So then...the tax levied in MN should be paid out in SD and wherever else the plants are? Something tells me that won't be as easy to push through the SD legislature...
That should read, "This is like putting a tax on wood cut in a sawmill in ND (or any other state including MN) because there is asbestos in the sawmills insulation." But that analogy is inaccurate because in the real case the greenhouse gases are a consequence of the method of power generation, whereas the sawmill doesn't create more asbestos every time they cut wood.
The core question seems to be, "Can the means for producing a good be regulated when the end product is identical?" If we look at child labor as a parallel example, the answer to my knowledge appears to be "no," since laws preventing sweatshops in the US do not prevent the sale of sweatshop-made goods produced elsewhere. Yet if Wikipedia is to be trusted, California and several other states have "passed bills requiring performance-based regulation of greenhouse gases from electricity generation," so at the very least there is some inconsistency.
I'm not convinced either way. Perhaps a car analogy is in order.
California has stricter emissions standards for automobiles, most of which are not manufactured in CA itself. The only difference between cars allowed for sale in CA and cars that aren't is the level of emissions they...er...emit. The utility (getting from point A to point B) is identical, it is the external cost of greenhouse gases that are regulated against.
It should be noted that, according to Wikipedia's Emission Standard article, California "faces a court challenge from the federal government," and though it doesn't go into detail one would presume that the logic in play is similar. Also from the same article, "California and several other western states have passed bills requiring performance-based regulation of greenhouse gases from electricity generation," so this doesn't appear to be a novel idea. There are no references for it, so I can't speak to its truth or how contested the existing laws are. Perhaps someone living in one of those states can provide more information.
By lying about what it is, they can generate a lot of heat and fire the public up against it.
Couldn't they just use that to generate power instead?
Is it just me, or did the government claim in Raich that consuming your own marijuana affects the interstate marijuana trade and that causes your marijuana or personal consumption to become interstate commerce? Is the government really trying to say that if I use marijuana I grow myself that I am hurting people who are importing marijuana? I know I must have read that wrong.
Nope, you read it right. It's the court that is wrong, and absurdly so. I recommend a read of Justice Thomas' dissenting opinion--it's pretty scathing and spot-on.
To ditto the anonymous coward who responded here, this is indeed a tariff and unconstitutional authority grab.
Look on the bright side! At least it's an unconstitutional authority grab by a state instead of the federal government! =)
There's also documentation of the temperatures being collected in all sorts of places that don't fit the guidelines for where they should be placed - such as some that have been found placed directly under the vent from a buildings furnace.
Which is why you automatically eliminate bad stations, something you were just criticizing the CRU for doing, re. Russia.
I ask this as a curious outsider, not an adversary: what are the criteria for considering a station to be "bad"? Some would certainly be obvious, like an average temperature jump of 10 degrees overnight, but I'm having trouble imagining a winnowing process that adequately controls for selection bias.
Any takers?
Hang on a minute. You originally wrote
In a single day, 20 some odd yahoos cost the US economy several hundred billions of dollars.
and now you write
In just a single day, the terrorists inflected between $1 trillion and $3 trillion.
neither of which is sourced. So...did you look at costofwar.com and revise your figure upward to support your conclusion? Because that's what it looks like to everyone else.
The cost of the two wars to our economy is also higher than costofwar reports. Much war spending goes into the pockets of the military-industrial complex and so gets recycled in our economy, but there are costs for expendable items (explosives, bullets) that essentially disappear. And then there are all those specially-built vehicles that we built for Iraq and can't use in Afghanistan, and they're not exactly useful back in the States to drive the kids to school in either. Fuel is burned up, not helping us in the long run. Lives are ended, more than the terrorists took.
And then there's the fact that war is not security and is in fact bad for it. Every innocent killed in "collateral damage" results in another potentially radicalized brother or father. We increase the supply of terrorists we're supposed to be eradicating.
Reacting is good. Overreacting, what the US has done, is more dangerous to the US than doing nothing.
Security should be up to the airlines. If the market dictates that peopel will choose to board a plane with no security, then so be it.
This is the most sensible thing I've read all year! Granted, we're only 5 days in, but it's a good start. I would be much more willing to fly if I didn't have to go through an onerous, time-consuming, and mostly pointless screening process. The only problem is, so would the terrorists! You can bet that if there were security-free airlines and another attack on a plane, it would be on one of the security-free planes. If that happened, my bet is that the airline company would crash along with the plane.
I agree that security should be up to the airlines, but I think better than a plane with no security is a plane with a kind of security other than passenger screening. Sky marshals come to mind immediately. I'm sure others have additional ideas. We'd end up with some airlines using full-body scans, for the safety-obsessed privacy-be-damned crowd, others using some combination of x-rayed carry-ons and metal detectors for most regular Joes, and a few rogues with no screening and maybe no security at all.
Kinda nice, having a choice, isn't it?
More dangerous, yet less onerous. There's a lesson here. Whenever someone brings up the necessity for invasive security screening at airports, they should be reminded of the relative dangers of automobiles. I don't have the stats offhand, but it's common knowledge, as you wrote, that you're much more likely to die in an auto collision than any terrorist attack (not just limited to planes).
More significantly, there is nothing we can realistically do to reduce the risk of death in an auto collision to anywhere near the risk of death by terrorist attack. Sure, we have driver's licenses, but there is necessarily too much autonomy for auto drivers to be "safe" by the rigorous standard applied to airline passengers. That autonomy combined with bad judgment and human error means getting into a car is very risky behavior when compared to getting on a plane, even with no security screening whatsoever.
Logically, then, people who advocate current and increased security measures for airline passengers should never set foot in an automobile because it is too dangerous. I have not had the opportunity to confront anyone with this reasoning, but I would be interested to see how they would respond. I don't think it would change anyone's mind by itself, but it could lead to interesting discussion of acceptable risk and convenience, and hopefully get them to rethink their assumptions.
Every ideological movement needs an enemy.
The West is their enemy. We could pull out entirely right now and we'd still be the Great Satan for generations and generations.
True--among radicals. Most people in the middle east just want to live their lives in peace. When that peace is interrupted by American bombs, the guys saying that America must be destroyed look less like nutjobs. Bin Laden has written that he wants the US to come to his country and rack up collateral damage because it will bankrupt the US while giving OBL an increasing supply of willing suicide bombers, people who would otherwise write him off as insane.
In short, the terrorists are winning because they are achieving their goals. It's a lot more work for them to train and send people over here to cause a few deaths than it is to let our country devour itself in an excessive reaction.
"This device is insecure" is too weak. "YOU'VE BEEN HACKED" in big red letters with further details below is the way to go. Eye-catching, and likely to get a response, especially if there's a number to call--keep in mind that most people are more comfortable with phones than the internets.
Putting goatse on there is irresponsible and unhelpful, especially in cases where the person who set up the channel is not the person displaying the frame (think grandma). Don't try to dress up your lulz as something they're not.
Won't someone think of the children's children's children's children's children's [...] children's children's children's children???
Neither of those (I believe the second two links are showing the same interface) are at all close to what the GP is looking for. The first is closer, in the same way that a 6-foot tall man is closer to passing clouds than a 5-foot tall man. I'm not sure exactly what the mechanics are behind the system in the first video, and the author's site isn't very informative, but it looks like it might be symbol-based; that is, he thinks "D3" hard enough and the system picks up on it.
The second links read brainwaves, and a computer decides what to play based on their levels...it's more like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book than writing your own.
If GP is looking for anything like I am looking for, though I highly doubt it will ever happen, the system should essentially be able to play back any sound that the user imagines, from a nuanced trumpet solo to a full orchestra to a pop song heard on the radio to interesting noise. Such a system would necessarily include thought-to-speech, and that's a hell of a long way off as well--unless like the writers of the article you consider 3 vowel sounds to constitute speech.
Exactly. People tend to forget that the analysis of a natural language necessarily comes after the language itself, and often mistake the descriptive system for a prescriptive one. Classification of language parts is useful, since it's easier to learn and remember things that are structured, but there will always be outliers and unsettled areas. The differences among described language systems highlight this.
And no, there is no need for the government to decree things. There is no need for the government to set prices. Under option 2, people would pay what they could afford. Prices would adjust naturally. If we simply mandated government balanced budgets, this would handle their end as well.
Would you believe that I had originally written something related to this, but deleted it to remove politics from my response? I am in full agreement with you here.
It looked to me like you were advocating "equal pay for all occupations" as a means to achieve the Utopian end rather than providing a description of the end itself, but your response cleared that up. I agree that a bachelor's degree shouldn't be necessary for med school, and other inefficiencies exist as well. I wonder if all the certifications required for teaching are necessary...one would think that a well-thought-out application process would let only good teachers through. Not having gone through it myself, I can't speak from experience.
Option 2 results in more individual freedom, which I deem valuable, and I think the chances of being bitten by unintended consequences by following option 1 are much higher. I think my misunderstanding is a result of the apparent contradiction between "no need for the government to decree things" and "regulated profession upon those in the private sector."
Indeed!
No scheme of inequality can be defended as corresponding to natural fact.... Superior and inferior can be determined only with respect to a single quality for a single purpose. Nor can a man's qualities be added together and averaged to give a final score or merit. In short, men are incommensurable and must be deemed equal.
- Jacques Barzun
As good private sector jobs (auto-workers, engineers...) go away, that high-end tax base drops as well.
That's not strictly true. When jobs are outsourced or automated, the people at the top of the company make bigger profits by using cheaper labor and the people at the bottom are out of work. Money that used to be dispersed in the local economy ends up in the higher-ups' pockets, pulling at the gap between rich and poor from both ends.
So the payment to the public sector should drop as well. There is no intrinsic reason a teacher should earn more than a waitress. I know I'd rather be a teacher than a fast food server. I've been both :)
Then you know how much more expensive it is, in both time and money, to become a teacher. Lots of people wouldn't be able to take that career path without being paid much more than a fast food server just to get out of school debt. (As an aside, the fast food server will likely be one of the first jobs to be automated in the coming years.) I like the utopia represented by The Australia Project in Manna as much as the next guy, but the path from *here* to *there* is not at all straightforward. You can't just declare "all jobs now pay the same, pick one" and expect the needs of the country to be met, even with a lot of automation. It would take a level of techne that still very much resides only in science fiction before such a move would be possible, and you'd face fierce opposition from the rich, who have the means to fight you every step of the way.
And we would all be able to have more 'stuff' as things would cost very little.
This already happens; it's just too slow for most of us to notice because we're so attuned to computing advancements, which happen quite rapidly. Most products either get cheaper over time or stay the same price while improving their specs. Inflation also must be taken into account. The process takes decades, but a lot of these items are durable goods, so it's not as slow as it sounds.
Ooh! What they need is a variety of uniforms depending on the task currently at hand! Working on a server outage? Put on the fireman outfit. Users not obeying your policies? Policeman. Laying cable or moving computers around? Cleaner. Spyware removal? Nurse. Coding? Scientist.
The Judge uniform should of course be used in all meetings, because any psychological trick to get management to actually listen to the IT department should be exploited to the fullest.
-1, Troll.
Here's the rest of the passage you cherry-picked:
6Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but like slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. 7Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men, 8because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free.
9And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.
I'd get into the cultural differences between slavery in the time of Christ and slavery in more recent times, but again, I don't really have a dog in this fight and you're just a troll.
[Gamers] are, for the most part, people who actually *think*. A religious game targeted at this group would make no sense, as many of the responses to this story have demonstrated.
Looks to me like most of the responses in this discussion have mischaracterized religion, ranging the spectrum from "religion is an evil, controlling, worthless fairy-tale" to "religion is the only reason we act ethically." The reality is a lot more complex, and IMO the closest analogue to religions are political parties--convenient ways for people of similar beliefs to congregate and shape the world. They do both good and evil, there are hundreds of different reasons for joining one, and people in other ones construct different conclusions given the same information.
I agree that video games aren't a good medium for handling religion though, because it's such a wide-ranging yet nuanced topic; the same goes for philosophy. You could do a game that promotes a particular view of a particular religion, and that's been done many times before. Lots of games have some religion, actual or fictional, as part of their setting, and it helps to give texture to the game world. But aside from something like Bible Adventures (preaching to the choir, and not very well) or the RPG someone mentioned that highlights how corrupt a church can be, it doesn't seem to me that there's a whole lot you can do to get people to really think about religion using a video game. IMO the same goes for classical arts like painting and sculpture, though my knowledge of those is admittedly weak.
The best way to get people to think about religion is through discussion and literature. Essays and books allow the author time and space to lay out his thoughts, and discussion allows new perspectives to challenge or expand existing views. Film can be used much in the same way as literature, but video games often (must) give the user too much freedom to have the intellectual punch of a good film. The problem is that religions and philosophies spur people to take certain actions. Games, with their focus on action (be it fighting or allocating resources or passing laws or what have you) can't play with the thought process that leads to the action--and that thought process is where philosophy and religion reside.
Of course I could be wrong. Someone might come up with a way to take the thought process into account, and I would find it immensely interesting to play such a game, but I think in this case the medium is the wrong shape for the content.
I shouldn't be getting involved in this stuff, but it pisses me off when quotes of a vengeful God from the Old Testament is trotted out to "disprove" some aspect of Christianity.
The Old Testament is present in Christian Bibles because it is part of Christian history--Jesus came out of Jewish culture, and the Old Testament is a collection of Jewish texts. Much of Jesus' teaching relied on knowledge of those texts because it gave him a starting point to expand on or to look at in a new way. If you can find some quotes in the New Testament to back up your argument, then you might give the Christians here something to chew on. The whole reason Jesus wasn't accepted by most followers of Judaism is because he was not the vengeful, war-mongering, state-overthrowing Messiah they expected. I don't think you'll have any luck finding orders for Christians to kill people in the New Testament.
Now, having said that, your point isn't invalidated: there is a problem with the label of "Christian." What it ought to refer to is "a person who follows the teachings of Christ," in which case the poster you're responding to is correct--killing people for not being Christians is against the teachings of Christ, so they are not Christians. But at this point in time, "Christian" refers to someone who is part of the Christian church, or someone who claims to be part of the Christian church. Since the church regularly takes part in actions that are against the teachings of Christ, it ought not to bear the "Christian" name, but there's no practical way to change that, and so your (and others') assertion that "by definition" rings false is true.
I myself have sidestepped the issue by no longer proclaiming myself a Christian, and instead letting my actions tell others what kind of person I am. I dislike getting involved in this stuff on /. because there's far too much animosity, and the Christian church deserves a lot of the criticism it gets, but if there's going to be debate it should at least be honest and informed.