While I am impressed that the DA admitted that a mistake had been made, he still went too far in covering the ass of the very unprofessional police officer who made this stupid arrest. From TFA:
[Freed] said the officer who charged Kelly acted in a "professional manner."
Avoiding accountability by throwing someone in jail for recording how you do your job is NOT professional. Rather, it is the act of a petty tyrant on a power trip who, if left unchecked, will most likely end up harming the public in other ways in the future. The citizens of Pennsylvania deserve better than this from their law enforcement agents.
It looks like the ACLU's position is that random, ad-hoc videotaping of police interactions by citizens is of a different nature than 24/7 videotaping of particular locations by the police. The specifics on the ACLU's concerns about public video surveillance are given in this summary:
Glancing through this article, I don't see that any of the points they raise would apply to citizens with video cameras on the lookout for police misconduct. I can't think of any legitimate downsides to the practice, but if anyone can, I'd be very interested to hear about them.
You are correct. Only Federal income tax goes towards Arab oil interests (for example, by using our military to keep the Saudi monarchy in power.) Federal gas taxes are specifically earmarked for transportation.
Let me explain what I mean by "metaphoric truth" a little better, using an example: If I say "curiosity killed the cat" I am speaking a metaphor. There never was a cat - the statement is literally untrue, yet it carries a truth that is different from its literal truth. I can remember confusing the early artificial intelligence program Eliza with metaphors when I was a kid. An AI system that has not been programmed to recognize metaphor would reply "I am sorry to hear that your cat has died. I hope that curiosity is brought to justice." The real meaning of my statement about curiosity killing the cat is that in certain circumstances, it's best to proceed with caution lest you blunder into something that causes you harm.
Jesus tended to teach by speaking in parables, which were stories which were not literally true, but which carried metaphoric truth. He wasn't alone in teaching this way - many great rabbis of the Jewish tradition taught using parables, some of which have survived in written form. Some readers of the Bible take metaphoric interpretation to the next level, where the story of Jesus' life it itself a metaphor; it therefore doesn't matter if anything in the Bible is factually true; what matters is the story and what you get out of the story. Think of your favorite fiction book, the one that is most meaningful to you. It's full of lies. The main character never lived. But did you get any truth out of it, anything universal enough to apply to your life? If so, that was metaphoric truth, which is a completely different thing than literal truth.
I would be careful of making statements which begin with "Christians say..." because there is a wide spectrum of opinions that fall under that label. Chances are you may only be familiar with those who shout the loudest and have the most obnoxious message.
I agree that religion is different from science. But not because it is faulty science. It isn't science at all. Anyone - critics or proponents - who mistakes it for science is missing the point. The people who put this museum together are missing the point.
It's like listening to a song that says "I will love you for 1000 years" and then trying to prove that the singer will actually live that long, just because the song is meaningful to them. The song can be literally false but metaphorically true at the same time. Science and literature are different, and while there are senses in which science is a metaphor (we know that at the atomic level, a table is mostly empty space, but at a Newtonian physics level, it's solid, so you can pick the paradigm you want to use to describe the table depending on what you want to do to it) but the way science works is different from the way literary criticism works, and unless spirituality is approached from a scientific perspective (as is the case with certain Buddhist techniques) it doesn't work to use the content of a religious and literary work as a goal toward which one should direct one's "scientific" inquiry. "Creation science" as embodied by this museum is silly. It ignores what is important about the Bible, and it ignores what is important about science.
The question is not whether it has been abused to keep people in line. That is true beyond a doubt. The question is whether it was written specifically for that purpose. My contention is that if it were written for that purpose, it would not have so much anti-establishment content. Jesus was a rabble-rouser who was executed for treason. This is not the kind of hero you want if you want to promote complacency! Some have speculated that this divergence between the content of the Bible and the desired consequences of belief is the reason why masses were held in Latin, a language that most people didn't understand, for so long, and why the Bible wasn't translated into common languages until the Reformation. If people found out what it really said, the powers that be would have a problem on their hands.
I believe the Native Americans are morally entitled to the special privilege of hosting casinos because not so very long ago all their land was stolen by the United States government at the same time they were rounded up like cattle, gunned down like bison, and subjected to biological warfare (specifically, the US army's gift of smallpox-infected blankets.) Casinos aren't a fair trade, but it's basically all they've been given in return. Free-market ideology falls on its face when it is called on to deal with colonialism, genocide, and legalized criminality. To quote the Dead Kennedys song "Where do you draw the line?":
Anarchy sounds good to me, till you ask who will fix the sewers
And will the rednecks just play king of the neighborhood?
The United States Government played "king of the neighborhood" for over a century, and now a small portion of its iniquities are being redressed by letting the Native Americans run casinos. I'm sorry if this steps on your right to open a privately-run casino, but they need it more than you, and since the house you live in is probably, like mine, built on land that was stolen from them, it seems fair to let them take that small right from you in exchange. If you go back far enough, all real estate can be traced back to theft, and in the United States someone's grandparent might remember exactly when it was stolen.
I agree that NCLB is a bad program, but that isn't what we're discussing here. The question is, should online gambling be taxed in order to provide education for impoverished areas. So although the federal government isn't the ideal entity to solve this problem (or to do nearly anything for that matter) unless the people living in these areas would say "no, there's too much federal involvement in our education - we'd rather not have a nice new school built here with enough funding for some good teachers" any (very true) facts about the federal government being incompetent aren't that relevant.
My opinion of the Federal government is probably about as low as yours, however, the question is: is a Federal tax on Internet gambling better than the alternative? And since the alternative is dire poverty for people that "our" government has screwed over since its founding, I'm in favor of it taking some action to right its wrongs. However buffoonish it may be in carrying this out, it will be better than doing nothing. There are no ideal solutions in sight, so we need to go with the lesser of the present evils until the glorious libertarian revolution bestows true equality on all humanity... or just takes us Beyond Thunderdome.
I'd like to see taxes on profits from online gambling go straight to funding for basic education in impoverished areas. Many Native casinos could be put out of business by this thing, and it would be a shame if those communities lost most of their revenue and nothing made up for it.
I agree with the libertarians that anyone should be able to engage in any "vice" they want to in the privacy of their own home as long as it doesn't directly harm anyone. But I also think we have a responsibility to those whose circumstances aren't as fortunate as ours have been. There are some nearly-third-world areas of the US that could use a leg up, and in the process of restoring some basic freedoms to us online yahoos and googlers, we could end up taking away their only hope for a better life.
Although the Bible has been used to keep people in line, it takes quite a stretch of interpretation to get that kind of a spin on it. Jesus was a radical rabbi who preached a very rigorous morality which did not favor the rich and powerful, and did not promote "family values." He told his followers "If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple," and "Let the dead bury their dead." He caused a scene with the moneychangers at the temple, and told his followers to sell all they had and give it to the poor.
If I were to write a book to keep people in line, I would keep this sort of thing out of it. It's too likely to inspire someone like Martin Luther King, Jr. to incite the underclass to get out of line.
Modern Biblical scholarship indicates that the first of the Gospels was written 70 years after the death of Jesus; therefore if Christianity started with Jesus and his immediate followers, there was at least 70 years where the religion pre-dated the book. The Jewish Bible was already written by that time, however there were significant debates in the first centuries of the Church regarding to what extent the Jewish Bible would be authoritative. (For example, see the discussions on whether or not to require circumcision for converts which occur in Paul's letters to the Galatians.) So at the beginning, at least, the New Testament was a collection of unwritten stories (along with others which were subsequently edited out) and the status of the Old Testament within the new religion was in doubt.
Sources of authority in the Roman Catholic Church have long included, in addition to scripture, what they called Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium (the authority of the church's hierarchy, headed by the Pope.) Martin Luther spearheaded the Protestant Reformation with the slogan "sola scriptura" ("by scripture alone") as a revolt against the structure and authority of the Catholic Church, and to some extent that slogan still resonates with some Protestant sects today, however, many mainstream Protestant denominations hold out other sources - for example, Anglicans state that their religion is based on "Scripture, Reason, and Tradition," a trio with which the great Medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas would agree. Methodists get their Christianity from "Scripture, Reason, Tradition, and Experience."
Metaphoric interpretations of the Bible are at least necessary in parts (was there literally a Good Samaritan or a Prodigal Son, or was Jesus just telling stories to illustrate his points?) Literal interpretation of the Bible is impossible in some areas (Did humans come about before or after the other animals? In the first creation story in Genesis 1, animals were made, then on day 6, man was made; in Genesis 2, man was made first, then the animals were made to keep him company. These are not both literally possible.) Throughout the history of the church, metaphorical interpretation of scripture has been used for various parts of the Bible. The only question is where is it appropriate to take this approach, and where is it appropriate to take the writings at face value? Just as the early members of the church had to decide which parts of Jewish tradition to keep, modern churches have to decide which parts of the Bible to take metaphorically, and which parts to take as a culturally-bound piece of history which has no bearing on today's society.
An example of rejecting parts of the Bible as culture-bound is the fact that Jesus was firmly opposed to divorce, but divorce had a very different social context in the first century as compared with today, leading many (but not all) modern denominations to approve of divorce in the right circumstances. The diversity of different Christian churches active today shows that there are a many judgment calls to be made, and that the Bible is not a simple book which can support only one interpretation.
Finally, and most importantly, there is more than one way for a story to be "true." There is literal truth, and there is metaphoric truth. There is undoubtedly at least some literal truth in the Bible. There isn't much question that there was a rabbi named Jesus who was executed for treason by the Roman army, for example. But in my to a large extent it's the metaphoric truth that makes the Bible significant to readers, not these historical details.
The author of the 1776 classic economic text An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, often abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is Adam Smith, not John Smith.
I agree with your statement that audiophiles don't use "professional" equipment, but I disagree with your statement that studio monitors will give you the sound that the recording engineer intended. This is because, as you imply, there is a distinct difference between accurate speakers and good-sounding speakers, and recording studios use accurate speakers, while consumers, even audiophiles, are better off with good-sounding speakers.
If you working in a recording studio, you want accuracy at all costs. You must hear everything distinctly, because you need to make important decisions based on what you hear. If "it sounds great" is all you are getting from your speakers, you won't make those tough decisions (more cymbals, different reverb, more compression on the vocals, or whatever.) You'll just leave it alone and it won't be as good as it could be. However, those extremely accurate speakers that are perfect for recording studio use are NOT pleasant for casual listening. Everything is too crisp and sharp, and they will tend to make you want a break from all that detail.
When I'm working on a mix in the studio, I want everything in very crisp detail so I can make judgments; when I'm listening to the final product, I want the music to "hang together" and present itself to me as a coherent whole. There are other differences between studio monitors and "normal" speakers (for example, consistency of frequency response) but this relatively subjective factor of detailed sound vs. coherent sound is one of the more important ones I have experienced.
The recording engineer did not intend for you to listen to the music on studio monitors. Studio monitors are a tool with a specific use, and that use is not everyday listening. The attributes of a good studio monitor just don't match up with the attributes of a good audiophile speaker. This is why audiophiles buy certain kinds of speakers, and recording engineers buy other kinds. I've been lucky enough to own both kinds of speakers, and I've tried using them for the wrong purpose with less-than-stellar results. Mixes made on good-sounding speakers are inconsistent on other speakers, and music played through accurate speakers isn't as pleasant to the ear.
Like the parent post says, you have to add up the harmful effects of each crime (and Glover continues, you need to divide it by the number of people participating in the action - in this case the viagra merchants and so forth) to see what the person's total culpability is.
I agree... Also, Kucinich is the only Democratic candidate who has consistently proven himself to be free of corporate entanglements over a long period of time. Obama's a relatively fresh face, and I'm willing to cut him some slack and see what he does. On the other hand, I'm firmly opposed to Clinton, who voted for the Iraq war and is currently rattling sabers about Iran. Anyone who believed Bush's BS and voted to invade Iraq is not fit to be President, no matter how contrite they may pretend to be at this time.
Kucinich was strongly opposed to Iraqi occupation from the beginning, and he's the one I would trust to keep us out of similar quagmires in the future. He seems to have the rare conviction that slaughtering civilians is not OK.
He's also the one I would trust to back renewable energy development and get us out of our current reliance on Saudi oil.
If the owner was "pressing charges" it would have been a civil suit, not a criminal suit. And if I were the judge of such a civil suit, I would gladly award the plaintiff $2.00, or whatever I could determine was fair market value for the amount of bandwidth used.
It was, however a criminal suit, which means that the state pressed charges.
Specifically, instead of the officer asking the coffee shop owner if he minded having people check their email from the street (recommending at least a "wi-fi for customers only" sign to the owner if that were the case) and then, if appropriate, asking the man in his car not to check his email there if doing so was against the wishes of the shop owner, the officer decided to waste hours of his time and the prosecutor's time to enforce a poorly-written law to the benefit of no one.
If this criminal suit had gone to court instead of being settled, and if the defendant had a decent lawyer, the state could have likely lost, as no fraud was committed (the actual outcome of the case would, of course, depend on the exact wording of the statute in question and the mood of the judge that day.) However, the defendant would have been stuck with a lawyer bill higher than the value of the time and money forfeited in the settlement.
The police officer should be reprimanded for his lack of judgment in filing the complaint, and the DA should be reprimanded for his lack of judgment in not dropping the case immediately. They both wasted taxpayer resources to coerce an unjustified settlement from a man who took, at most, a couple bucks of apparently freely-offered bandwidth.
With public servants like these, who needs public enemies?! (IANAL)
You have a good point here - I agree with you that Google should act like a common carrier. If it doesn't act like one, and receive the treatment of one, it's going to turn into a quagmire. For the most part it does, and in the instances where it doesn't, it's generally heading down the wrong path.
One notable exception is the avoidance of search-engine spam. Google needs to keep its spiders on the lookout for people making funky pages designed to artificially boost rankings, otherwise it's going to turn into a pond of sewage where you are presented with pages upon pages of Viagra ads every time you try to search for anything.
The line between neutrally indexing and presenting any and all content that is out there and filtering that content to keep it relevant can be defined by the question, "does this help meet the needs of someone performing a search?" If so, do it; if not, don't.
For example, removing information about Nazi activities, as some European governments have requested, does not help meet the needs of searchers. The searcher is as likely to be a student writing a paper about Nazi groups or an opponent as it is to be a would-be member. On the other hand, refusing to index pages of gibberish with advertisements on them does not harm any actual searchers (unless it's students researching the phenomenon of search-engine spam!)
NPC's method of conducting transactions is basically the same as PayPal's - they do the relatively difficult task of gathering a valid ACH routing number and account number once, then tie this information to some other form of identification (in PayPal's case, your email address and password; in NPC's case, your license number and PIN) so that transactions can be processed on the relatively inexpensive ACH network rather than the relatively expensive VISA/MC/Amex/Discover network.
The advantages to the merchant are (1) reduced transaction fees, and (2) reduced exposure to liability for stolen cards and other fraud. If someone steals your Visa card information and uses it to buy a bunch of stuff at a retailer, that retailer is left holding the bag when you dispute the transactions; the retailer has basically no recourse. If someone steals your checkbook or ACH information, the playing field is much more level. In the case of NPC, they are willing to eat all but $50 of any fraudulent charges that occur. This will make retailers happy.
From these two examples, PayPal and NPC, we can see how a number of new payment systems could work: You just get the customer's ACH info, tie it to some form of ID (retina, RFID, celphone, fingerprint, voiceprint, barcode tattoo, Number of the Beast, or whatever) and start raking in 1% of sales (which is preferable to the 3% merchants have to pay now for credit card services.) Note that PayPal charges 3% for their services, which they are able to get away with due to their status as an EBay property, and the ease of setting up a "merchant account." More and more companies are going to start moving into this market, just because the business model is so obvious. There has long been a pent-up demand for an alternative to the aging and clunky credit card system, and this might just be the crack in the dike that leads to a revolution in payment systems.
The photographer's complaint was not with Google indexing and showing thumbnails from HIS website, but rather with Google indexing and showing thumbnails from OTHER sites which had illegal copies of his photographs. The photographer has no control over the robot.txt file of the other sites, and his complaint is that "...Google substantially assists websites to distribute their infringing copies to a worldwide market and assists a worldwide audience of users to access infringing materials."
The real issue here is whether Google deserves a kind of common-carrier status, whereby they are not responsible for the content they index and return as a search result, or not. For example, the telephone company can't be sued if someone uses a telephone to plot a robbery because they are a "common carrier" and are not expected to know or censor the content that is shared over their network.
My own personal opinion is that the nature of Google's business resembles a telephone company more than anything else - when their crawlers come across an image, Google has no idea if the image is hosted legally or not, and it places an undue burden on Google to expect them to figure out the legal status of each image they index and thumbnail.
Although causality in the real world can never be proven, it is very useful to act as though causality exists.
People who act as if causality does not exist cannot effectively manipulate their environments to achieve desired results. We tend to call such people insane.
Therefore causality is useful, and (following the reasoning of William James) that means it's "true" to the best extent that anything in the real world ever can be.
If Kucinich was the only person accusing Cheney of crimes, or if there wasn't an abundance of evidence of those crimes, then it might be reasonable to ask why Kucinich was bringing it up. But since Cheney's crimes are quite obvious, the real question should be why no one else in the House has the guts to cosponsor the impeachment. Exactly how criminal does an administration have to be before anyone is willing to stand up and do something about it? Nixon was brought down by a simple political burglary, and Cheney has helped start a war of aggression that has cost over 60,000 lives
Kucinich's case is well documented. Check the case out for yourself. And even if Kucinich were bringing these charges just to increase his own popularity, if the charges are justified, who cares? The charges are substantive, and have nothing to do with Kucinich. Ad hominem arguments against Kucinich are red herrings... look at the facts!
"it can detect whether a portion of a copyrighted video or audio tract has been overlaid or stored as part of a new and original media file. "
This means if your feature-length documentary has a bit of perfectly legal ad footage in it, it will be flagged. Hopefully media distribution companies like YouTube won't rely on this technology exclusively, or there will be a lot of false positives.
As a taxpayer, I am a lot happier subsidizing this solar scheme than I am subsidizing petroleum schemes. Take, for example, the $275-million-per-day war in Iraq... That money could buy a lot of solar panels.
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While I am impressed that the DA admitted that a mistake had been made, he still went too far in covering the ass of the very unprofessional police officer who made this stupid arrest. From TFA:
[Freed] said the officer who charged Kelly acted in a "professional manner."
Avoiding accountability by throwing someone in jail for recording how you do your job is NOT professional. Rather, it is the act of a petty tyrant on a power trip who, if left unchecked, will most likely end up harming the public in other ways in the future. The citizens of Pennsylvania deserve better than this from their law enforcement agents.
It looks like the ACLU's position is that random, ad-hoc videotaping of police interactions by citizens is of a different nature than 24/7 videotaping of particular locations by the police. The specifics on the ACLU's concerns about public video surveillance are given in this summary:
2 5.html
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/spying/14863res200202
Glancing through this article, I don't see that any of the points they raise would apply to citizens with video cameras on the lookout for police misconduct. I can't think of any legitimate downsides to the practice, but if anyone can, I'd be very interested to hear about them.
You are correct. Only Federal income tax goes towards Arab oil interests (for example, by using our military to keep the Saudi monarchy in power.) Federal gas taxes are specifically earmarked for transportation.
Let me explain what I mean by "metaphoric truth" a little better, using an example: If I say "curiosity killed the cat" I am speaking a metaphor. There never was a cat - the statement is literally untrue, yet it carries a truth that is different from its literal truth. I can remember confusing the early artificial intelligence program Eliza with metaphors when I was a kid. An AI system that has not been programmed to recognize metaphor would reply "I am sorry to hear that your cat has died. I hope that curiosity is brought to justice." The real meaning of my statement about curiosity killing the cat is that in certain circumstances, it's best to proceed with caution lest you blunder into something that causes you harm.
Jesus tended to teach by speaking in parables, which were stories which were not literally true, but which carried metaphoric truth. He wasn't alone in teaching this way - many great rabbis of the Jewish tradition taught using parables, some of which have survived in written form. Some readers of the Bible take metaphoric interpretation to the next level, where the story of Jesus' life it itself a metaphor; it therefore doesn't matter if anything in the Bible is factually true; what matters is the story and what you get out of the story. Think of your favorite fiction book, the one that is most meaningful to you. It's full of lies. The main character never lived. But did you get any truth out of it, anything universal enough to apply to your life? If so, that was metaphoric truth, which is a completely different thing than literal truth.
I would be careful of making statements which begin with "Christians say..." because there is a wide spectrum of opinions that fall under that label. Chances are you may only be familiar with those who shout the loudest and have the most obnoxious message. I agree that religion is different from science. But not because it is faulty science. It isn't science at all. Anyone - critics or proponents - who mistakes it for science is missing the point. The people who put this museum together are missing the point.
It's like listening to a song that says "I will love you for 1000 years" and then trying to prove that the singer will actually live that long, just because the song is meaningful to them. The song can be literally false but metaphorically true at the same time. Science and literature are different, and while there are senses in which science is a metaphor (we know that at the atomic level, a table is mostly empty space, but at a Newtonian physics level, it's solid, so you can pick the paradigm you want to use to describe the table depending on what you want to do to it) but the way science works is different from the way literary criticism works, and unless spirituality is approached from a scientific perspective (as is the case with certain Buddhist techniques) it doesn't work to use the content of a religious and literary work as a goal toward which one should direct one's "scientific" inquiry. "Creation science" as embodied by this museum is silly. It ignores what is important about the Bible, and it ignores what is important about science.
The question is not whether it has been abused to keep people in line. That is true beyond a doubt. The question is whether it was written specifically for that purpose. My contention is that if it were written for that purpose, it would not have so much anti-establishment content. Jesus was a rabble-rouser who was executed for treason. This is not the kind of hero you want if you want to promote complacency! Some have speculated that this divergence between the content of the Bible and the desired consequences of belief is the reason why masses were held in Latin, a language that most people didn't understand, for so long, and why the Bible wasn't translated into common languages until the Reformation. If people found out what it really said, the powers that be would have a problem on their hands.
I believe the Native Americans are morally entitled to the special privilege of hosting casinos because not so very long ago all their land was stolen by the United States government at the same time they were rounded up like cattle, gunned down like bison, and subjected to biological warfare (specifically, the US army's gift of smallpox-infected blankets.) Casinos aren't a fair trade, but it's basically all they've been given in return. Free-market ideology falls on its face when it is called on to deal with colonialism, genocide, and legalized criminality. To quote the Dead Kennedys song "Where do you draw the line?":
Anarchy sounds good to me, till you ask who will fix the sewers
And will the rednecks just play king of the neighborhood?
The United States Government played "king of the neighborhood" for over a century, and now a small portion of its iniquities are being redressed by letting the Native Americans run casinos. I'm sorry if this steps on your right to open a privately-run casino, but they need it more than you, and since the house you live in is probably, like mine, built on land that was stolen from them, it seems fair to let them take that small right from you in exchange. If you go back far enough, all real estate can be traced back to theft, and in the United States someone's grandparent might remember exactly when it was stolen.
I agree that NCLB is a bad program, but that isn't what we're discussing here. The question is, should online gambling be taxed in order to provide education for impoverished areas. So although the federal government isn't the ideal entity to solve this problem (or to do nearly anything for that matter) unless the people living in these areas would say "no, there's too much federal involvement in our education - we'd rather not have a nice new school built here with enough funding for some good teachers" any (very true) facts about the federal government being incompetent aren't that relevant.
My opinion of the Federal government is probably about as low as yours, however, the question is: is a Federal tax on Internet gambling better than the alternative? And since the alternative is dire poverty for people that "our" government has screwed over since its founding, I'm in favor of it taking some action to right its wrongs. However buffoonish it may be in carrying this out, it will be better than doing nothing. There are no ideal solutions in sight, so we need to go with the lesser of the present evils until the glorious libertarian revolution bestows true equality on all humanity... or just takes us Beyond Thunderdome.
I'd like to see taxes on profits from online gambling go straight to funding for basic education in impoverished areas. Many Native casinos could be put out of business by this thing, and it would be a shame if those communities lost most of their revenue and nothing made up for it.
I agree with the libertarians that anyone should be able to engage in any "vice" they want to in the privacy of their own home as long as it doesn't directly harm anyone. But I also think we have a responsibility to those whose circumstances aren't as fortunate as ours have been. There are some nearly-third-world areas of the US that could use a leg up, and in the process of restoring some basic freedoms to us online yahoos and googlers, we could end up taking away their only hope for a better life.
Although the Bible has been used to keep people in line, it takes quite a stretch of interpretation to get that kind of a spin on it. Jesus was a radical rabbi who preached a very rigorous morality which did not favor the rich and powerful, and did not promote "family values." He told his followers "If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple," and "Let the dead bury their dead." He caused a scene with the moneychangers at the temple, and told his followers to sell all they had and give it to the poor.
If I were to write a book to keep people in line, I would keep this sort of thing out of it. It's too likely to inspire someone like Martin Luther King, Jr. to incite the underclass to get out of line.
Modern Biblical scholarship indicates that the first of the Gospels was written 70 years after the death of Jesus; therefore if Christianity started with Jesus and his immediate followers, there was at least 70 years where the religion pre-dated the book. The Jewish Bible was already written by that time, however there were significant debates in the first centuries of the Church regarding to what extent the Jewish Bible would be authoritative. (For example, see the discussions on whether or not to require circumcision for converts which occur in Paul's letters to the Galatians.) So at the beginning, at least, the New Testament was a collection of unwritten stories (along with others which were subsequently edited out) and the status of the Old Testament within the new religion was in doubt.
Sources of authority in the Roman Catholic Church have long included, in addition to scripture, what they called Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium (the authority of the church's hierarchy, headed by the Pope.) Martin Luther spearheaded the Protestant Reformation with the slogan "sola scriptura" ("by scripture alone") as a revolt against the structure and authority of the Catholic Church, and to some extent that slogan still resonates with some Protestant sects today, however, many mainstream Protestant denominations hold out other sources - for example, Anglicans state that their religion is based on "Scripture, Reason, and Tradition," a trio with which the great Medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas would agree. Methodists get their Christianity from "Scripture, Reason, Tradition, and Experience."
Metaphoric interpretations of the Bible are at least necessary in parts (was there literally a Good Samaritan or a Prodigal Son, or was Jesus just telling stories to illustrate his points?) Literal interpretation of the Bible is impossible in some areas (Did humans come about before or after the other animals? In the first creation story in Genesis 1, animals were made, then on day 6, man was made; in Genesis 2, man was made first, then the animals were made to keep him company. These are not both literally possible.) Throughout the history of the church, metaphorical interpretation of scripture has been used for various parts of the Bible. The only question is where is it appropriate to take this approach, and where is it appropriate to take the writings at face value? Just as the early members of the church had to decide which parts of Jewish tradition to keep, modern churches have to decide which parts of the Bible to take metaphorically, and which parts to take as a culturally-bound piece of history which has no bearing on today's society.
An example of rejecting parts of the Bible as culture-bound is the fact that Jesus was firmly opposed to divorce, but divorce had a very different social context in the first century as compared with today, leading many (but not all) modern denominations to approve of divorce in the right circumstances. The diversity of different Christian churches active today shows that there are a many judgment calls to be made, and that the Bible is not a simple book which can support only one interpretation.
Finally, and most importantly, there is more than one way for a story to be "true." There is literal truth, and there is metaphoric truth. There is undoubtedly at least some literal truth in the Bible. There isn't much question that there was a rabbi named Jesus who was executed for treason by the Roman army, for example. But in my to a large extent it's the metaphoric truth that makes the Bible significant to readers, not these historical details.
The author of the 1776 classic economic text An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, often abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is Adam Smith, not John Smith.
I agree with your statement that audiophiles don't use "professional" equipment, but I disagree with your statement that studio monitors will give you the sound that the recording engineer intended. This is because, as you imply, there is a distinct difference between accurate speakers and good-sounding speakers, and recording studios use accurate speakers, while consumers, even audiophiles, are better off with good-sounding speakers.
If you working in a recording studio, you want accuracy at all costs. You must hear everything distinctly, because you need to make important decisions based on what you hear. If "it sounds great" is all you are getting from your speakers, you won't make those tough decisions (more cymbals, different reverb, more compression on the vocals, or whatever.) You'll just leave it alone and it won't be as good as it could be. However, those extremely accurate speakers that are perfect for recording studio use are NOT pleasant for casual listening. Everything is too crisp and sharp, and they will tend to make you want a break from all that detail.
When I'm working on a mix in the studio, I want everything in very crisp detail so I can make judgments; when I'm listening to the final product, I want the music to "hang together" and present itself to me as a coherent whole. There are other differences between studio monitors and "normal" speakers (for example, consistency of frequency response) but this relatively subjective factor of detailed sound vs. coherent sound is one of the more important ones I have experienced.
The recording engineer did not intend for you to listen to the music on studio monitors. Studio monitors are a tool with a specific use, and that use is not everyday listening. The attributes of a good studio monitor just don't match up with the attributes of a good audiophile speaker. This is why audiophiles buy certain kinds of speakers, and recording engineers buy other kinds. I've been lucky enough to own both kinds of speakers, and I've tried using them for the wrong purpose with less-than-stellar results. Mixes made on good-sounding speakers are inconsistent on other speakers, and music played through accurate speakers isn't as pleasant to the ear.
The ethicist Jonathan Glover has written what some consider to be the definitive paper on committing multiple small crimes:
/ EDU/Jonathan%20Glover.pdf
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/resources_ug
Like the parent post says, you have to add up the harmful effects of each crime (and Glover continues, you need to divide it by the number of people participating in the action - in this case the viagra merchants and so forth) to see what the person's total culpability is.
I'm pretty sure Roundup is not used on certified-organic farms.
I agree... Also, Kucinich is the only Democratic candidate who has consistently proven himself to be free of corporate entanglements over a long period of time. Obama's a relatively fresh face, and I'm willing to cut him some slack and see what he does. On the other hand, I'm firmly opposed to Clinton, who voted for the Iraq war and is currently rattling sabers about Iran. Anyone who believed Bush's BS and voted to invade Iraq is not fit to be President, no matter how contrite they may pretend to be at this time.
Kucinich was strongly opposed to Iraqi occupation from the beginning, and he's the one I would trust to keep us out of similar quagmires in the future. He seems to have the rare conviction that slaughtering civilians is not OK.
He's also the one I would trust to back renewable energy development and get us out of our current reliance on Saudi oil.
If the owner was "pressing charges" it would have been a civil suit, not a criminal suit. And if I were the judge of such a civil suit, I would gladly award the plaintiff $2.00, or whatever I could determine was fair market value for the amount of bandwidth used.
It was, however a criminal suit, which means that the state pressed charges.
Specifically, instead of the officer asking the coffee shop owner if he minded having people check their email from the street (recommending at least a "wi-fi for customers only" sign to the owner if that were the case) and then, if appropriate, asking the man in his car not to check his email there if doing so was against the wishes of the shop owner, the officer decided to waste hours of his time and the prosecutor's time to enforce a poorly-written law to the benefit of no one.
If this criminal suit had gone to court instead of being settled, and if the defendant had a decent lawyer, the state could have likely lost, as no fraud was committed (the actual outcome of the case would, of course, depend on the exact wording of the statute in question and the mood of the judge that day.) However, the defendant would have been stuck with a lawyer bill higher than the value of the time and money forfeited in the settlement.
The police officer should be reprimanded for his lack of judgment in filing the complaint, and the DA should be reprimanded for his lack of judgment in not dropping the case immediately. They both wasted taxpayer resources to coerce an unjustified settlement from a man who took, at most, a couple bucks of apparently freely-offered bandwidth.
With public servants like these, who needs public enemies?!
(IANAL)
You have a good point here - I agree with you that Google should act like a common carrier. If it doesn't act like one, and receive the treatment of one, it's going to turn into a quagmire. For the most part it does, and in the instances where it doesn't, it's generally heading down the wrong path.
One notable exception is the avoidance of search-engine spam. Google needs to keep its spiders on the lookout for people making funky pages designed to artificially boost rankings, otherwise it's going to turn into a pond of sewage where you are presented with pages upon pages of Viagra ads every time you try to search for anything.
The line between neutrally indexing and presenting any and all content that is out there and filtering that content to keep it relevant can be defined by the question, "does this help meet the needs of someone performing a search?" If so, do it; if not, don't.
For example, removing information about Nazi activities, as some European governments have requested, does not help meet the needs of searchers. The searcher is as likely to be a student writing a paper about Nazi groups or an opponent as it is to be a would-be member. On the other hand, refusing to index pages of gibberish with advertisements on them does not harm any actual searchers (unless it's students researching the phenomenon of search-engine spam!)
NPC's method of conducting transactions is basically the same as PayPal's - they do the relatively difficult task of gathering a valid ACH routing number and account number once, then tie this information to some other form of identification (in PayPal's case, your email address and password; in NPC's case, your license number and PIN) so that transactions can be processed on the relatively inexpensive ACH network rather than the relatively expensive VISA/MC/Amex/Discover network.
The advantages to the merchant are (1) reduced transaction fees, and (2) reduced exposure to liability for stolen cards and other fraud. If someone steals your Visa card information and uses it to buy a bunch of stuff at a retailer, that retailer is left holding the bag when you dispute the transactions; the retailer has basically no recourse. If someone steals your checkbook or ACH information, the playing field is much more level. In the case of NPC, they are willing to eat all but $50 of any fraudulent charges that occur. This will make retailers happy.
From these two examples, PayPal and NPC, we can see how a number of new payment systems could work: You just get the customer's ACH info, tie it to some form of ID (retina, RFID, celphone, fingerprint, voiceprint, barcode tattoo, Number of the Beast, or whatever) and start raking in 1% of sales (which is preferable to the 3% merchants have to pay now for credit card services.) Note that PayPal charges 3% for their services, which they are able to get away with due to their status as an EBay property, and the ease of setting up a "merchant account." More and more companies are going to start moving into this market, just because the business model is so obvious. There has long been a pent-up demand for an alternative to the aging and clunky credit card system, and this might just be the crack in the dike that leads to a revolution in payment systems.
The photographer's complaint was not with Google indexing and showing thumbnails from HIS website, but rather with Google indexing and showing thumbnails from OTHER sites which had illegal copies of his photographs. The photographer has no control over the robot.txt file of the other sites, and his complaint is that "...Google substantially assists websites to distribute their infringing copies to a worldwide market and assists a worldwide audience of users to access infringing materials."
The real issue here is whether Google deserves a kind of common-carrier status, whereby they are not responsible for the content they index and return as a search result, or not. For example, the telephone company can't be sued if someone uses a telephone to plot a robbery because they are a "common carrier" and are not expected to know or censor the content that is shared over their network.
My own personal opinion is that the nature of Google's business resembles a telephone company more than anything else - when their crawlers come across an image, Google has no idea if the image is hosted legally or not, and it places an undue burden on Google to expect them to figure out the legal status of each image they index and thumbnail.
Translated into German, that's "Hasselhoff!"
Although causality in the real world can never be proven, it is very useful to act as though causality exists.
People who act as if causality does not exist cannot effectively manipulate their environments to achieve desired results. We tend to call such people insane.
Therefore causality is useful, and (following the reasoning of William James) that means it's "true" to the best extent that anything in the real world ever can be.
Check out Nuremberg Principle 6a - it's a Crime against Peace to start a war of aggression based on lies.
If Kucinich was the only person accusing Cheney of crimes, or if there wasn't an abundance of evidence of those crimes, then it might be reasonable to ask why Kucinich was bringing it up. But since Cheney's crimes are quite obvious, the real question should be why no one else in the House has the guts to cosponsor the impeachment. Exactly how criminal does an administration have to be before anyone is willing to stand up and do something about it? Nixon was brought down by a simple political burglary, and Cheney has helped start a war of aggression that has cost over 60,000 lives
Kucinich's case is well documented. Check the case out for yourself. And even if Kucinich were bringing these charges just to increase his own popularity, if the charges are justified, who cares? The charges are substantive, and have nothing to do with Kucinich. Ad hominem arguments against Kucinich are red herrings... look at the facts!
from TFA:
"it can detect whether a portion of a copyrighted video or audio tract has been overlaid or stored as part of a new and original media file. "
This means if your feature-length documentary has a bit of perfectly legal ad footage in it, it will be flagged. Hopefully media distribution companies like YouTube won't rely on this technology exclusively, or there will be a lot of false positives.
is the source of all anonymous Slashdot posts.
As a taxpayer, I am a lot happier subsidizing this solar scheme than I am subsidizing petroleum schemes. Take, for example, the $275-million-per-day war in Iraq... That money could buy a lot of solar panels.