In the 1970's there was a book called "Four Arguments for the Abolition of Television", or something like that. One of the arguments was the limited image quality of the 512 line scan made even very poorly faked emotions very hard to distinguish from the real thing, and so children who got their learning examples of human expressions from TV would have a hard time telling who was really feeling emotions or just faking them. The author also claimed that emotions such as Rage, Fear, and Strong Suffering would come through better than subtler emotions such as Boredom, Fondness or Compassion, so TV scripts would come to emphasize those emotions which at least somewhat worked and ignore the rest. Perhaps there's something to these ideas.
While you are at it, what happens if they test specifially with medical personnel who have been told they need to spot people faking pain to get their opiate fix,and avoid at all costs encouraging their addiction?
There's a good precedent for your argument that this is a question of instinctual skill vrs trained skill, but it doesn't take anything like a billion examples to train a person in the example I'm considering. A very common way to teach health care personnel to recognize Fetal Alchohol Syndrome is to give them an album with several hundred photos of people in various life stages, all suffering from FAS. This method has worked since the time when the photos were black and white, and in fact, using color shots or video footage doesn't seem to have any impact on success or the number of examples needed. Once someone is trained that way, the success percentage is in the very high 90s, and stays that way, at least for a typical crreer. Similar methods are used for other diseases, for example most people have learned to spot Down's syndrome from just a few examples, but where the syndrome produces only some of the usual appearance effects, spotting the 'borderline cases' with high accuracy can be taught this same way, usually taking about 15 minutes.
There's a lot of evidence that the typical really flat out evil criminal, the sort who shoots a convenience store clerk just because they catch them studying for school and so trying to move up in the world, can't really project consequences enough to plan more than a few weeks into the future. They don't see any connection with what they do now and what will happen even a few months down the road. Yes, we could try and implement the death penalty more quickly, but how could we possibly make it so the time from the crime being comitted to the time they were arrested, given a fair trial, and executed, was measurable in weeks or even days? How could we have any justice at all in such a headlong plummet? That's what it would take for deterrence to work, massively probable consequences that would all come back on the person within weeks of them committing the crime, just so a small percentage of people considering the same crime would have it fresh in their very limited memories. And since most of these people also cannot empathize with anybody not very much like themselves, we would have to flood the news with reports of people they found similar enough to make examples they could learn from. That's what deterrence would require, for most of those very worst crimes we are the most appalled by. We might manage punishment. We might manage justice. We might even manage reform, at least sometimes. The one thing that we will never do in such cases is to deter by example.
By that standard, if I kick a young healthy person in the shin,, I should get these hypothetical drugs as part of my punishment for a minor assault. After all, it's very unlikely I've shortened my hypothetical victim's life. Of course I also haven't likely left him wishing he could find the nerve to terminate his intollerably bruised shinned existence, fearing all human intimacy due to the risk of getting the other shin kicked, or otherwise impared to where the number of years he has left matters one way or the other.
We aren't discussing murder victims once someone says the victims have a lot of years left. This thread of the topic has focused on people who survived and are physically not so damaged they won't live long, and yet some people are debating over whether a subjective 1,000 year sentence is a good idea for such crimes. Advocating thousand year sentences for assaults that leave the victim mostly physically unimpaired - sounds like a great new definition of subhuman savagry to me.
Not nearly all Protestants are biblical literalists. Most of the mainstream believe that scripture is sufficient without needing a person to interpret it for the common man. That becomes more a matter of the priest or minister being just a person who leads rituals and not a necessary intermediary between the common man and God. But sufficent is not at all the same thing as inerrant.
I agreee that the Republican National Comittee are control freaks, and to a lesser extent, so's the Roman Catholic Church (I llke this Pope better than Bennie so far though). Most organized religions devolve to be about control, whatever the founders and reformers intended. Galileo got more flack for ignoring the Pope's order not to publish for the common man in Itallian until he had presented his arguments to the learned in Latin and let the church have prior approval, than anything else. Secular judges still put people away for talking about a case outside court, and not usually just house arrest either, so I'm not sure why people think what the RCC did there was especially wrong, but are OK with their legal system today. .
ALL religions have a philosophical basis, which was what initially formed them. As they pass from generation to generation, they tend to attract more beleivers who don't know the difference between what may have originally been metaphors of that philosophy and more literal claims. Various reformations and fluctuations occur. Right now, a couple of the organized Satanic movements have attracted a lot of people who didn't just find an emotional objection to the sort of Christianity they were raised on, but saw philosophical issues. That sort of thing varies a lot - people might leave the Dominionists or Quiverfull movement for a more rational Christian church such as the Methodists (and no, I'm not a Methodist just because I said something nice about them - I could argue that the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox or even Coptic branches are a lot more sollidly based on a resonable philosophical tradition than most of the American Fundamentalists branches), or take up Zen or other Eastern traditions, just as easily as Satanism.
Saying Satanism isnt really a religion is essentially comparing some specific organized forms that are making philosophical arguments at the current time*, and leaving out the ones that aren't**, then cherry picking other religions for the opposite approach. It would be just as fair to say "Christianity isn't really a religion, it's more of an ultra-liberal philosophy", based solely on the Unitarian or Episcopal churches.
*For example, offering to put up a Baphomet monument to match the Ten Commandments.
** Unless you count "We wanna have an effing orgy and get wasted" as a philosophy. It's amazing how many people need some supernatural power's permission to get drunk and screw.
If anything, it makes sense to count how long a species has been evolving in terms of generations, not years. Most conifers have a longer time between generations than humans, so they have fewer evolutionary intervals than humans. I don't even know how you could get an average of how long a generation is for the human evolutionary history, back to tree shrews or even to the first chordates - how could we calculate the total number of evolutionary steps our ancestors made and compare this to a pine tree's ancestry?
I suspect one of the points you are missing is that Germany certainly did call Einstein a traitor, and certainly had laid the groundwork for executing him specifically for treason and not just as part of the final solution if they had captured him after a successful conclusion to their war.. Another one is that the United States has a very limited definition of treason, which is actually spelled out in the constitution.
Article 3 - The Judicial Branch Section 3 - Treason
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
By that definition, neither Einstein nor Snowden would even possibly count as a traitor. The arguement you're making comes off as everyone should use some other definition of traitor that is broader than in the US Constitution, but somehow doesn't allow the sort of abuses a nation such as Nazi Germany would commit with such a legal basis, so that Snowden might count while Einstein, Fermi, et. al. couldn't possibly..Unless you care to formally offer such a definition, and see what happens when a few hundered Slashdotters try to pick it apart and you find it isn't anything like any of either the precise LEGAL, the proper ETHICAL or the GENERALLY ACCEPTED definitions of treason, the side you're supporting boils down to saying "I know it when I see it, and everybody else needs to just shut up and let me decide". You can guess how well that will be received playing to this crowd.
The point is, we have two entities who appear to fall in the same domain (non-treasonous things). Someone created an analogy that correctly asserts these two entities do in fact belong in the same domain. Then someone else declared, by apparent fiat, that the analogy was irrelevant. Not flawed, not violating some principle of logic, but simply irrelevant. Every analogy is imperfect. All are flawed to some extent, and matter only because they can still be useful to get to a correct conclusion despite the flaws. This analogy may have more flaws than a great many, (In fact, I think analogies of this sort seldom lead to the correct conclusion, and generally shed more heat than light on their subjects) but still, in this case, it has somehow led to the correct conclusion, therefore it simply cannot be irrelevant. Declaring it irrelevant is thus not a counterargument, but an attempt to suppress speech. You probably don't want to endorse the AC doing that, instead of rationally addressing the flaws specifially and not just dismissing the whole.
Russia is still inhabited by a lot of people who still have power AND who were trained in the Soviet version of MAD (Mutual Assured Distruction, for those who didn't spot or don't grok the acronym already) . This means that, when people in the west start classifying Putin as another possible 'classic nutcase leader', along the lines of Saddam Hussein, Moammar Kadafi or the Ayatollah Khomeini , they should remember, Putin has some very different reasons why he might just want to give the appearance of being one. ,
I'll let the AC explain what he thinks is wrong, if he will actually step up to the plate. But, you do realize that this story starts with Timothy mentioning what a small percentage of the OS community thinks, and doesn't mention a somewhat more likely possibility - that Google is dissatisfied with the GTK, finds it very difficult to work within its limits, and doesn't feel it can get any cooperation from the GTK designers. If that is how Google feels, then the AC would probably say Google's position is reasonable. I tend to agree with that, myself. But, what's the point of asking the AC to defend his position, when that same position was totally left out of Timothy's original summary, and the position of those who don't see any problems with the GTK is presented as the default of the whole open source community?
Summary: Ooooohhhh! Anybody who doesn't like FOO is a rapist of dead baby seals and unmutual to boot! We're gonna just assume that absolutely everybody reasonable likes FOO, and raise only the questions those reasonable people would ask mean old unreasonable Google. AC: Well I don't like FOO because it's smelly and might let girls into the Sekret club... You: AC, you need to explain mo' betterer
Yes, AC probably should present some specific facts, if this was a debate over GTK's quality. But even if you turn this whole thread into a debate with the AC and others like him, win every point, and leave the rest of us impressed with your clarity and logical superiority, do you really think that will prove Google's reasons are as invalid as your debate opponent's?. The facts are, there is an ongoing debate o in the OS community over the conduct of the GTK developers. The summary needs to be written like the community is still seriously divided, not like the only questions being asked are from people who don't see a problem with the GTK and assume that Googgle can't really have a good reason.
That's a paraphraseof Joe Stalin's “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”. It's a good quote, but it raises the question, is that true of governments in general, at all times, or only when the government is a dictatorship like his was. As you've given it, you could mean either a warning people should heed and can maybe still do something about, or an exercise in sophomore pessimism that says we should all do nothing at all. It's easy to sound wise by saying something most readers will interpret whichever way suits their temperament, but which way do YOU see it?
Not quite: The idea is that you pay as much as the work is worth to the worker, and charge as much as the product is worth to the customer. The difference between these two can still be a positive number because the same good can be worth different amounts to different people. If it is, you profit. If it isn't, why did you start that business, when a market survey should have told you not to. Nobody pays more than what they have to to get workers, or gives a customer a better deal than will gain sales. Still, thank you for at least saying customers rather than consumers.
There's the latest group of "lazy poor'"people the Republican party kept from getting any of your hard earned money.
Every single vote against this bill came from a Republican, and the 60 vote Super-majority rule in the US senate means a pure Republican minority managed to block the bill. Reasons given include the claim that the VA backlog has increased and spending the money would encourage veterans to try and use the system instead of giving up on it. VA backlogs had been steadily decreasing until the sequester kicked in.
I'm pretty sure this particular case of stupid Republican thinking has affected you, and will continue to affect you. It's certainly affected me - now every time a Republican says "Thank you for your service", I hear "... you sucker that thought we really meant it.".
TOMMY, by Rudyard Kipling
I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer, The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here." The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die, I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play.
I went into a theatre as sober as could be, They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me; They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls, But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide,
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap; An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too, But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you; An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints, Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.
You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all: We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational. Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "
The producer in this case pled to four criminal counts relating to his contracts with the actors, and has been convicted and is now serving time. He also has a previous history of multiple felonies, including a previous fraud conviction. The whole of every single contract was invalidatable, not by some technicality, but by the very fact that he was a felon still on parole, and used an alias in all his dealings and signings, and that is entirely settled law that such contracts are invalid, before we even get to the counts where he actually admitted to fraudulent representations in those contracts. I'd just about guarantee you that's enough to make the lawsuit, and others like it from other actors involved, both reasonable and prone to survive appeal in any circuit. They could probably survive an appeal to SCOTUS, in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Louis Brandeis or Thurgood Marshall eras.
Find my earlier post in this thread, and read it. You owe a couple of people, at least one of which is ten times the person you might ever hope to be, an apology (starting with the judge you keep calling a thug, and ending with Holi). The question is not whether you will hear nonsense, it's will you hear facts, when those facts make you look petty and judgemental.
The director didn't "trick" the actors - if the judge is correct in his analysis, the director committed fraud against the actors. No quotation marks, just a real criminal act, which, if true, also makes releasing the film automatically a criminally negligent act, (reckless endangenrment) again without any quotes around the facts. It's like Traci Lords may have genuinely tricked the directors of her first few films into thinking she was over 18, or she may have "tricked" them, but it doesn't matter, as you still have no right what-so-ever to watch an X rated film that features a person still a minor under US law. People can argue over whether the producers knew Ms. Lords was under 18, or not, but it simply doesn't change whether you have a right to watch those films, either way.
The argument in this case runs the same way, the judge has ruled that, at the very least, there wasn't a valid contract. (The producer was a previously convicted felon, who had legal restrictions as part of his probation against using an alias, and yet used one in representing himself to the actors and in signing their contracts, and who has pled guilty to this, and three other charges including making false statements, He's already convicted and serving time). Presumption of who is "tricking", or tricking whom also follows. You're trying to make this a debate over who may have committed this or that other act of trickery that is yet unproven, and may be just a matter of tort law either way, and ignoring that one side has been convicted of criminal acts, which makes your whole point moot. The contract is invalid, and all the actors have the right to seek protection from the consequences of their involvement. They are threatened with death, and that threat exists as a consequence of whole set of proven criminal acts.
They have that right in some jurisdictions even if every single one of them suspected, or even knew that the producer was an ex con, or that the law prohibited him from using an alias, just like we can charge one person who planned a bank robbery with murder in the commission of a felony, even though the 'victim' was one of his fellow robbers. But if you want to claim you know for an absolute fact that all the actors knew the producer was committing a crime, go right ahead and claim it. They still have a right to be protected as much as possible from being killed as a consequence of the producer's felonious actions, and you don't have a right to have them put at further risk, whether that feels like your first amendment right is what you're invoking, or not.
I really hate to see the whole "big invisible guy in the sky" type argument, because it works for everything. If you treat Capitalism as though that whole "Invisible Hand of the Market" was entirely literal and not a metaphor, Capitalism sounds like a bunch of lunatic thinking too. Reduce Marxism to the idea that the state has to become stronger to wither away, and it looks like you've instantly refuted all Communism. Take strict materialism down to its soundbites and you are likely to 'prove' all action is irrational. (Indeed, someone once said that the only person ever to fully articulate a pure materialist-existentialist position outside of an asylum was H. P. Lovecraft). Take any philosophy that has dualistic elements, whether it's Cartesian Dualism, the left-right political dichotomy, or some form of supernaturalism, and you can easily make it sound like nothing new has happened in philosophy since Zoroaster.
State the fundamentals of modern science the right way, and you can easily make all modern scientists look every bit as silly as any old religion. (Really, "truth is not the same as provability"? I can write that claim in a way that sounds just like Donald Rumsfield rambling about known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and falsely portray that as what Godel claimed and all modern scientists march in lockstep to, and probably if some right wing pundit put that claim on the air, Niel Tyson would get death threats for redoing Cosmos). The "Big Sky Guy's gonna zap you if you're naughty" type argument is just the same sort of straw man that was used to try and refute Einstein (turning Relativity into "Everything's Relative" and then saying that there's no un-relative basis to Special Relativity to even need refuting).
All modern religions are built on philosophical roots - all of them. The fact that many people follow those religions without having learned or even heard of those roots means nothing, any more than the fact that there are many people who claim to be Capitalists in the USA who have never actually read "The Wealth of nations", let alone Von Mises. If anyone, as an Atheist, wants to debate about religion, they need to look at the real fundamentals of that religion. Raising an arugument that was addressed as long ago as St. Augustine or even Martin Luther and thinking the Atheist has spotted something brand spanking new that all those billions of Christians never considered because they weren't as smart as said Atheist is a fundamentally delusional state, even if there really isn't a God.
He doesn't need facts, his mind is already made up, and reality will just have to give in to his opinions. Note that he's citing Zimbabwe as a counter-example to Switzerland, on a question which hinges upon which nation understands economics more - and that there's no welfare system for the average citizen in Zimbabwe at all, let alone universal minimum income, so what he's really saying is that 'even a country with no welfare has hyperinflation, so Switzerland, in its current state, let alone the hypothetical future state, is impossible'. rudy_wayne is basically claiming he doesn't believe Switzerland circa 2014 exists! "A four minute mile? Don't be rediculous! Bob here has no arms and legs, how could he ever run a four minute mile? And if he can't, nobody can! There, I've refuted you!".
To rudy_wayne, I take the remark about "anyone with even the most basic understanding" as an attempt to personally insult every single person who disagrees with you, on anything at all, and win the argument by insult instead of facts. I was tempted to stoop to your level and "kindly suggest" you STFU, as the last thing Slashdot needs more of is people who can't be bothered to read the article/thread/link, before they have to descend to personal attacks, but I'll ask you to actually think instead - read the wiki, follow through as needed, and then quote some things you want to refute, make an arguement and I'll read it. Right now, your'e all sound and fury, signifying nothing. It's obvious you feel personally threatened by the very idea Switzerland might deviate from True Capitalism, but I'll hope you can control the emotional explosion until you actually look at some facts first and form an opinion second, whether that opinion is similar to wvmarle's, mine, or your current one in the end.
It's far from a sane, balanced view, simply because it's not a choice between "the current US administration" and a next one that "doesn't give a shit about leaks that embarrassed Hillary" - it would be a choice to wait for various future states, not one future state and one current.
If Assange really is just waiting out the current administration, he will be up against either a Republican administration that really likes the NRO, NSA, CIA and all the rest having near unlimited powers, and will put anybody those organizations don't like on their "High Priority - No Good Bum" list, or a Democratic administration where Hillary herself is likely to be Commander in Chief. There's very, very little chance the US will actually elect either a Republican that actually wants to reign in Homeland Security and would promote compromise on the Assange case to help do it, or a Democrat that isn't Hillary herself. Both states that migh prevail if Assange waits are likely to be worse than the state right now, from his point of view.
Saying Assange is playing a waiting game is effectively saying he is desperate, and gambiling on very low odds outcomes.
The crooks printed more than a couple of million dollars worth. Still, the government could print $40 million to $200 million less in total for the year, and if they got that number near enough to what the criminals actually printed, then the crime has actually done no damage to the financial system, not contributed to inflation risk, and actually saved the US government some operating costs.
Slashdot Mirror
In the 1970's there was a book called "Four Arguments for the Abolition of Television", or something like that. One of the arguments was the limited image quality of the 512 line scan made even very poorly faked emotions very hard to distinguish from the real thing, and so children who got their learning examples of human expressions from TV would have a hard time telling who was really feeling emotions or just faking them. The author also claimed that emotions such as Rage, Fear, and Strong Suffering would come through better than subtler emotions such as Boredom, Fondness or Compassion, so TV scripts would come to emphasize those emotions which at least somewhat worked and ignore the rest. Perhaps there's something to these ideas.
While you are at it, what happens if they test specifially with medical personnel who have been told they need to spot people faking pain to get their opiate fix,and avoid at all costs encouraging their addiction?
There's a good precedent for your argument that this is a question of instinctual skill vrs trained skill, but it doesn't take anything like a billion examples to train a person in the example I'm considering. A very common way to teach health care personnel to recognize Fetal Alchohol Syndrome is to give them an album with several hundred photos of people in various life stages, all suffering from FAS. This method has worked since the time when the photos were black and white, and in fact, using color shots or video footage doesn't seem to have any impact on success or the number of examples needed. Once someone is trained that way, the success percentage is in the very high 90s, and stays that way, at least for a typical crreer. Similar methods are used for other diseases, for example most people have learned to spot Down's syndrome from just a few examples, but where the syndrome produces only some of the usual appearance effects, spotting the 'borderline cases' with high accuracy can be taught this same way, usually taking about 15 minutes.
There's a lot of evidence that the typical really flat out evil criminal, the sort who shoots a convenience store clerk just because they catch them studying for school and so trying to move up in the world, can't really project consequences enough to plan more than a few weeks into the future. They don't see any connection with what they do now and what will happen even a few months down the road. Yes, we could try and implement the death penalty more quickly, but how could we possibly make it so the time from the crime being comitted to the time they were arrested, given a fair trial, and executed, was measurable in weeks or even days?
How could we have any justice at all in such a headlong plummet? That's what it would take for deterrence to work, massively probable consequences that would all come back on the person within weeks of them committing the crime, just so a small percentage of people considering the same crime would have it fresh in their very limited memories. And since most of these people also cannot empathize with anybody not very much like themselves, we would have to flood the news with reports of people they found similar enough to make examples they could learn from. That's what deterrence would require, for most of those very worst crimes we are the most appalled by. We might manage punishment. We might manage justice. We might even manage reform, at least sometimes. The one thing that we will never do in such cases is to deter by example.
By that standard, if I kick a young healthy person in the shin,, I should get these hypothetical drugs as part of my punishment for a minor assault. After all, it's very unlikely I've shortened my hypothetical victim's life. Of course I also haven't likely left him wishing he could find the nerve to terminate his intollerably bruised shinned existence, fearing all human intimacy due to the risk of getting the other shin kicked, or otherwise impared to where the number of years he has left matters one way or the other.
We aren't discussing murder victims once someone says the victims have a lot of years left. This thread of the topic has focused on people who survived and are physically not so damaged they won't live long, and yet some people are debating over whether a subjective 1,000 year sentence is a good idea for such crimes. Advocating thousand year sentences for assaults that leave the victim mostly physically unimpaired - sounds like a great new definition of subhuman savagry to me.
Not nearly all Protestants are biblical literalists. Most of the mainstream believe that scripture is sufficient without needing a person to interpret it for the common man. That becomes more a matter of the priest or minister being just a person who leads rituals and not a necessary intermediary between the common man and God. But sufficent is not at all the same thing as inerrant.
I agreee that the Republican National Comittee are control freaks, and to a lesser extent, so's the Roman Catholic Church (I llke this Pope better than Bennie so far though). Most organized religions devolve to be about control, whatever the founders and reformers intended. Galileo got more flack for ignoring the Pope's order not to publish for the common man in Itallian until he had presented his arguments to the learned in Latin and let the church have prior approval, than anything else. Secular judges still put people away for talking about a case outside court, and not usually just house arrest either, so I'm not sure why people think what the RCC did there was especially wrong, but are OK with their legal system today. .
If you've seen how poorly the average chimp is hung, you wouldn't be so surprised that happens.
ALL religions have a philosophical basis, which was what initially formed them. As they pass from generation to generation, they tend to attract more beleivers who don't know the difference between what may have originally been metaphors of that philosophy and more literal claims. Various reformations and fluctuations occur. Right now, a couple of the organized Satanic movements have attracted a lot of people who didn't just find an emotional objection to the sort of Christianity they were raised on, but saw philosophical issues. That sort of thing varies a lot - people might leave the Dominionists or Quiverfull movement for a more rational Christian church such as the Methodists (and no, I'm not a Methodist just because I said something nice about them - I could argue that the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox or even Coptic branches are a lot more sollidly based on a resonable philosophical tradition than most of the American Fundamentalists branches), or take up Zen or other Eastern traditions, just as easily as Satanism.
Saying Satanism isnt really a religion is essentially comparing some specific organized forms that are making philosophical arguments at the current time*, and leaving out the ones that aren't**, then cherry picking other religions for the opposite approach. It would be just as fair to say "Christianity isn't really a religion, it's more of an ultra-liberal philosophy", based solely on the Unitarian or Episcopal churches.
*For example, offering to put up a Baphomet monument to match the Ten Commandments.
** Unless you count "We wanna have an effing orgy and get wasted" as a philosophy. It's amazing how many people need some supernatural power's permission to get drunk and screw.
If anything, it makes sense to count how long a species has been evolving in terms of generations, not years. Most conifers have a longer time between generations than humans, so they have fewer evolutionary intervals than humans. I don't even know how you could get an average of how long a generation is for the human evolutionary history, back to tree shrews or even to the first chordates - how could we calculate the total number of evolutionary steps our ancestors made and compare this to a pine tree's ancestry?
I suspect one of the points you are missing is that Germany certainly did call Einstein a traitor, and certainly had laid the groundwork for executing him specifically for treason and not just as part of the final solution if they had captured him after a successful conclusion to their war.. Another one is that the United States has a very limited definition of treason, which is actually spelled out in the constitution.
Article 3 - The Judicial Branch
Section 3 - Treason
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
By that definition, neither Einstein nor Snowden would even possibly count as a traitor. The arguement you're making comes off as everyone should use some other definition of traitor that is broader than in the US Constitution, but somehow doesn't allow the sort of abuses a nation such as Nazi Germany would commit with such a legal basis, so that Snowden might count while Einstein, Fermi, et. al. couldn't possibly. .Unless you care to formally offer such a definition, and see what happens when a few hundered Slashdotters try to pick it apart and you find it isn't anything like any of either the precise LEGAL, the proper ETHICAL or the GENERALLY ACCEPTED definitions of treason, the side you're supporting boils down to saying "I know it when I see it, and everybody else needs to just shut up and let me decide". You can guess how well that will be received playing to this crowd.
The point is, we have two entities who appear to fall in the same domain (non-treasonous things). Someone created an analogy that correctly asserts these two entities do in fact belong in the same domain. Then someone else declared, by apparent fiat, that the analogy was irrelevant. Not flawed, not violating some principle of logic, but simply irrelevant. Every analogy is imperfect. All are flawed to some extent, and matter only because they can still be useful to get to a correct conclusion despite the flaws. This analogy may have more flaws than a great many, (In fact, I think analogies of this sort seldom lead to the correct conclusion, and generally shed more heat than light on their subjects) but still, in this case, it has somehow led to the correct conclusion, therefore it simply cannot be irrelevant. Declaring it irrelevant is thus not a counterargument, but an attempt to suppress speech. You probably don't want to endorse the AC doing that, instead of rationally addressing the flaws specifially and not just dismissing the whole.
Russia is still inhabited by a lot of people who still have power AND who were trained in the Soviet version of MAD (Mutual Assured Distruction, for those who didn't spot or don't grok the acronym already) . This means that, when people in the west start classifying Putin as another possible 'classic nutcase leader', along the lines of Saddam Hussein, Moammar Kadafi or the Ayatollah Khomeini , they should remember, Putin has some very different reasons why he might just want to give the appearance of being one. ,
I'll let the AC explain what he thinks is wrong, if he will actually step up to the plate.
But, you do realize that this story starts with Timothy mentioning what a small percentage of the OS community thinks, and doesn't mention a somewhat more likely possibility - that Google is dissatisfied with the GTK, finds it very difficult to work within its limits, and doesn't feel it can get any cooperation from the GTK designers. If that is how Google feels, then the AC would probably say Google's position is reasonable. I tend to agree with that, myself. But, what's the point of asking the AC to defend his position, when that same position was totally left out of Timothy's original summary, and the position of those who don't see any problems with the GTK is presented as the default of the whole open source community?
Summary: Ooooohhhh! Anybody who doesn't like FOO is a rapist of dead baby seals and unmutual to boot! We're gonna just assume that absolutely everybody reasonable likes FOO, and raise only the questions those reasonable people would ask mean old unreasonable Google.
AC: Well I don't like FOO because it's smelly and might let girls into the Sekret club...
You: AC, you need to explain mo' betterer
Yes, AC probably should present some specific facts, if this was a debate over GTK's quality. But even if you turn this whole thread into a debate with the AC and others like him, win every point, and leave the rest of us impressed with your clarity and logical superiority, do you really think that will prove Google's reasons are as invalid as your debate opponent's?. The facts are, there is an ongoing debate o in the OS community over the conduct of the GTK developers. The summary needs to be written like the community is still seriously divided, not like the only questions being asked are from people who don't see a problem with the GTK and assume that Googgle can't really have a good reason.
That's a paraphraseof Joe Stalin's “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”. It's a good quote, but it raises the question, is that true of governments in general, at all times, or only when the government is a dictatorship like his was. As you've given it, you could mean either a warning people should heed and can maybe still do something about, or an exercise in sophomore pessimism that says we should all do nothing at all. It's easy to sound wise by saying something most readers will interpret whichever way suits their temperament, but which way do YOU see it?
Not quite: The idea is that you pay as much as the work is worth to the worker, and charge as much as the product is worth to the customer. The difference between these two can still be a positive number because the same good can be worth different amounts to different people. If it is, you profit. If it isn't, why did you start that business, when a market survey should have told you not to. Nobody pays more than what they have to to get workers, or gives a customer a better deal than will gain sales. Still, thank you for at least saying customers rather than consumers.
Here's a nice video of Dr. Feynman explaining why a mirror works the eay it does - be thou unstymied!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Republicans are opposed to giving your hard earned money to people such as wounded veterans:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
There's the latest group of "lazy poor'"people the Republican party kept from getting any of your hard earned money.
Every single vote against this bill came from a Republican, and the 60 vote Super-majority rule in the US senate means a pure Republican minority managed to block the bill. Reasons given include the claim that the VA backlog has increased and spending the money would encourage veterans to try and use the system instead of giving up on it. VA backlogs had been steadily decreasing until the sequester kicked in.
I'm pretty sure this particular case of stupid Republican thinking has affected you, and will continue to affect you. It's certainly affected me - now every time a Republican says "Thank you for your service", I hear "... you sucker that thought we really meant it.".
TOMMY, by Rudyard Kipling
I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play.
I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide,
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.
You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "
The producer in this case pled to four criminal counts relating to his contracts with the actors, and has been convicted and is now serving time. He also has a previous history of multiple felonies, including a previous fraud conviction. The whole of every single contract was invalidatable, not by some technicality, but by the very fact that he was a felon still on parole, and used an alias in all his dealings and signings, and that is entirely settled law that such contracts are invalid, before we even get to the counts where he actually admitted to fraudulent representations in those contracts. I'd just about guarantee you that's enough to make the lawsuit, and others like it from other actors involved, both reasonable and prone to survive appeal in any circuit. They could probably survive an appeal to SCOTUS, in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Louis Brandeis or Thurgood Marshall eras.
Find my earlier post in this thread, and read it. You owe a couple of people, at least one of which is ten times the person you might ever hope to be, an apology (starting with the judge you keep calling a thug, and ending with Holi). The question is not whether you will hear nonsense, it's will you hear facts, when those facts make you look petty and judgemental.
The director didn't "trick" the actors - if the judge is correct in his analysis, the director committed fraud against the actors. No quotation marks, just a real criminal act, which, if true, also makes releasing the film automatically a criminally negligent act, (reckless endangenrment) again without any quotes around the facts.
It's like Traci Lords may have genuinely tricked the directors of her first few films into thinking she was over 18, or she may have "tricked" them, but it doesn't matter, as you still have no right what-so-ever to watch an X rated film that features a person still a minor under US law. People can argue over whether the producers knew Ms. Lords was under 18, or not, but it simply doesn't change whether you have a right to watch those films, either way.
The argument in this case runs the same way, the judge has ruled that, at the very least, there wasn't a valid contract. (The producer was a previously convicted felon, who had legal restrictions as part of his probation against using an alias, and yet used one in representing himself to the actors and in signing their contracts, and who has pled guilty to this, and three other charges including making false statements, He's already convicted and serving time). Presumption of who is "tricking", or tricking whom also follows. You're trying to make this a debate over who may have committed this or that other act of trickery that is yet unproven, and may be just a matter of tort law either way, and ignoring that one side has been convicted of criminal acts, which makes your whole point moot. The contract is invalid, and all the actors have the right to seek protection from the consequences of their involvement. They are threatened with death, and that threat exists as a consequence of whole set of proven criminal acts.
They have that right in some jurisdictions even if every single one of them suspected, or even knew that the producer was an ex con, or that the law prohibited him from using an alias, just like we can charge one person who planned a bank robbery with murder in the commission of a felony, even though the 'victim' was one of his fellow robbers. But if you want to claim you know for an absolute fact that all the actors knew the producer was committing a crime, go right ahead and claim it. They still have a right to be protected as much as possible from being killed as a consequence of the producer's felonious actions, and you don't have a right to have them put at further risk, whether that feels like your first amendment right is what you're invoking, or not.
My mother was a mouse, you insensitive clod! (And I turned out OK...)
I really hate to see the whole "big invisible guy in the sky" type argument, because it works for everything. If you treat Capitalism as though that whole "Invisible Hand of the Market" was entirely literal and not a metaphor, Capitalism sounds like a bunch of lunatic thinking too. Reduce Marxism to the idea that the state has to become stronger to wither away, and it looks like you've instantly refuted all Communism. Take strict materialism down to its soundbites and you are likely to 'prove' all action is irrational. (Indeed, someone once said that the only person ever to fully articulate a pure materialist-existentialist position outside of an asylum was H. P. Lovecraft). Take any philosophy that has dualistic elements, whether it's Cartesian Dualism, the left-right political dichotomy, or some form of supernaturalism, and you can easily make it sound like nothing new has happened in philosophy since Zoroaster.
State the fundamentals of modern science the right way, and you can easily make all modern scientists look every bit as silly as any old religion. (Really, "truth is not the same as provability"? I can write that claim in a way that sounds just like Donald Rumsfield rambling about known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and falsely portray that as what Godel claimed and all modern scientists march in lockstep to, and probably if some right wing pundit put that claim on the air, Niel Tyson would get death threats for redoing Cosmos). The "Big Sky Guy's gonna zap you if you're naughty" type argument is just the same sort of straw man that was used to try and refute Einstein (turning Relativity into "Everything's Relative" and then saying that there's no un-relative basis to Special Relativity to even need refuting).
All modern religions are built on philosophical roots - all of them. The fact that many people follow those religions without having learned or even heard of those roots means nothing, any more than the fact that there are many people who claim to be Capitalists in the USA who have never actually read "The Wealth of nations", let alone Von Mises. If anyone, as an Atheist, wants to debate about religion, they need to look at the real fundamentals of that religion. Raising an arugument that was addressed as long ago as St. Augustine or even Martin Luther and thinking the Atheist has spotted something brand spanking new that all those billions of Christians never considered because they weren't as smart as said Atheist is a fundamentally delusional state, even if there really isn't a God.
He doesn't need facts, his mind is already made up, and reality will just have to give in to his opinions. Note that he's citing Zimbabwe as a counter-example to Switzerland, on a question which hinges upon which nation understands economics more - and that there's no welfare system for the average citizen in Zimbabwe at all, let alone universal minimum income, so what he's really saying is that 'even a country with no welfare has hyperinflation, so Switzerland, in its current state, let alone the hypothetical future state, is impossible'. rudy_wayne is basically claiming he doesn't believe Switzerland circa 2014 exists! "A four minute mile? Don't be rediculous! Bob here has no arms and legs, how could he ever run a four minute mile? And if he can't, nobody can! There, I've refuted you!".
To rudy_wayne, I take the remark about "anyone with even the most basic understanding" as an attempt to personally insult every single person who disagrees with you, on anything at all, and win the argument by insult instead of facts. I was tempted to stoop to your level and "kindly suggest" you STFU, as the last thing Slashdot needs more of is people who can't be bothered to read the article/thread/link, before they have to descend to personal attacks, but I'll ask you to actually think instead - read the wiki, follow through as needed, and then quote some things you want to refute, make an arguement and I'll read it. Right now, your'e all sound and fury, signifying nothing. It's obvious you feel personally threatened by the very idea Switzerland might deviate from True Capitalism, but I'll hope you can control the emotional explosion until you actually look at some facts first and form an opinion second, whether that opinion is similar to wvmarle's, mine, or your current one in the end.
It's far from a sane, balanced view, simply because it's not a choice between "the current US administration" and a next one that "doesn't give a shit about leaks that embarrassed Hillary" - it would be a choice to wait for various future states, not one future state and one current.
If Assange really is just waiting out the current administration, he will be up against either a Republican administration that really likes the NRO, NSA, CIA and all the rest having near unlimited powers, and will put anybody those organizations don't like on their "High Priority - No Good Bum" list, or a Democratic administration where Hillary herself is likely to be Commander in Chief. There's very, very little chance the US will actually elect either a Republican that actually wants to reign in Homeland Security and would promote compromise on the Assange case to help do it, or a Democrat that isn't Hillary herself. Both states that migh prevail if Assange waits are likely to be worse than the state right now, from his point of view.
Saying Assange is playing a waiting game is effectively saying he is desperate, and gambiling on very low odds outcomes.
Where are you going?:
No Wait... nobody will get this part... Nevermind! Forget I said anything, before this thread turns into some sort of crusade.
The crooks printed more than a couple of million dollars worth. Still, the government could print $40 million to $200 million less in total for the year, and if they got that number near enough to what the criminals actually printed, then the crime has actually done no damage to the financial system, not contributed to inflation risk, and actually saved the US government some operating costs.