If Christ had lusted after a woman (or man for that matter), then he would have committed sin,...It's important that we understand the difference between temptation and the act itself.
I guess that is where the sticking point is for me: what means lust? Christ stated that you can sin in thought as well as deed. And obviously, lust is a sin of thought. So the sinful act is the act of thinking lustful thoughts. But what distinguishes a lustful, sinful thought from a not-quite lustful, merely tempted to sin thought?
I guess it boils down to what you mean by "lust after a woman". Is being horny considered lust? Or is it only lust if you fantasize? That's the problem I have with the whole "sinful thoughts are as bad as sinful actions" thing. Actions are concrete, easy to define. Thoughts, well, not so much. Where is the line between tempted to sin (which implies thinking about sin) and sinning in thought?
The only man who never lusted after a woman (or a man), was Jesus Christ.
I'll believe he didn't masturbate, or that he didn't fantasize about sex, but he never felt lust, i.e. horniness? Then he was not human, and did not face the same temptations to sin that every other man on the planet has at one point or another. Which is pretty contrary to the spirit of our salvation through his sacrifice.
Well, I don't know exactly how the GP meant his comment, but assuming he meant it the way I took it, he is somewhat correct:) Not that Europe or Asia don't have equally valid (or more so) cultures, but they have not been nearly as succesful in exporting their cultures to the global market. In the sense of gaining cultural* adoption by others, America is clearly unrivaled. Who doesn't drink Coke, watch Hollywood films, and listen to rock'n'roll?
Absolutely!! The only difference between Federal and State is the scale. Some people say Federal is too big to effectively govern certain aspects, State is the proper size, and point to the Constitution to back themselves up.
However, when the Constitution was framed, the Federal government was actually much smaller than the average State government today. At the time the Framers were drafting the Constitution, there were only about 3 million people in the whole country. And they decided that this was too many people to govern with a single monolithic government, that a single rule of law could not fit comfortably across so many people, except for the very limited areas in which they explicitly spelled out the Federal government's powers. Everything else required smaller, more personalized attention by the state governments to give people justice.
The difference between the Internet and your theoretical public phone conversation is ease of access. You probably don't have millions of people following you every day, waiting for you to slip up and reveal something in a public phone conversation. How many scripts you think are floating around, eavesdropping on every unprotected exchange they find? You can walk around revealing personal information in public phone conversations, throw every pay stub out in your kitchen trash, and very easily never pay a price for your lack of vigilance, because no one is actively targetting you for this. On the Internet, EVERYONE is a targe, generally multiple times. The Internet brings economies of scale to what used to be the province of "dumpster divers".
Because it takes control from the market (which you are a part of) to an entity that does not always do the right thing.
Let me rephrase that for you.
Because it takes control from the market (which you are a part of and that does not always do the right thing) to an entity that does not always do the right thing, and you are a part of.
If you aren't a part of the government, it is only because you don't choose to be. Hell, even if you only vote, that probably gives you as much influence over the gov't as your $$ does over the market. Unless you spend a whole lot more than I do.
You're right; it is ridiculous that residents are serving 36 hour shifts on occasion. However, this has nothing to do with trying to see as many patients as possible. The residents could work just as many hours, and see just as many patients, working two 18 hour shifts, with a break in between. Hospital managers claim that it is a staffing issue, but I don't see how. From the doctors that I have spoken to about it, it is more of a "We had to do it as residents, now you have to do it" mentality than anything else. More of a hazing attitude than anything to do with greed.
They have purposely designed a system where they take as many patients as possible, and therefore have to work crazy hours.
I am kind of glad that the hospitals and clinics and such take "as many patients as possible". I'd rather get that doctor working at 30% capacity than try to diagnose my own case of necrotizing fasciitis b/c "Dr. Smith just had to go home and get his eight hours of sleep, just come back tomorrow when he is feeling nice and refreshed." Or do you think they can just add doctors to the rotations so that everyone's hours can be cut? They can't. There aren't exactly a lot of enemployed MDs sitting at home watching cartoons, you know. Not to mention the incredibly thin margins many public hospitals run on.
If doctors were really in it for the money, they would all be plastic surgeons.
will some of you learned people please tell me why it was good for FDR to monitor communications between Nazi and Imperial Japanese intelligence, and their assets here?...And why can't Bush do the same?
Assuming this happened, and assuming it was in fact good, there is still a pretty crucial difference that explains why Americans should not allow Bush to do the same. We were at war with Japan and Germany back then. We are not currently at war with anybody except Iraq. If this program was aimed at monitoring "domestic assets" attached to the Iraq insurgency, I would have less qualms about it. It is not. It is aimed at monitoring "domestic assets" of terrorists". We have already seen multiple examples of the term terrorist being misapplied to non-terrorist individuals, in order to take advantage of the lowered protections or harsher penalties associated with a terror crime. So, since drug dealers can now be charged as terrorists, my phone call to my brother who deals drugs in Canada can now be monitored under this program.*
Additionally, we knew WWII was over when Japan surrendered. When will the War on Terror end? Probably right after the War on Drugs... So, it is BAD for the government to assume additional powers against certain individuals when A) these individuals are NOT clearly defined, and often seem to simply be whoever law enforcement says they are, and B) the time period for these "temporary" measures is equally as fuzzy.
And if you don't buy that argument, how about the fact that when FDR did it, our duly appointed representatives in Congress had not yet laid down the explicit guidelines for how such behavior was to be gone about, so FDR wasn't going outside of those guidelines. Bush & company have specific guidelines saying "If you want to do this, you must do it in this manner." They did not do it in that manner, but instead said that these rules do not apply to them. It is a bad precendent to allow the President to decide which rules apply to him and which do not.
Then why is everybody so surprised that the MPAA is trying to protect their products?
I don't think anyone is really surprised that the MPAA is trying to protect their products. I think what everyone is surprised/completely pissed off about is the fact that the MPAA is claiming such ridiculous losses due to piracy, and using these outrageous claims to "justify" forcing everyone to pay for their losses. The problem is, they have zero evidence to back up their numbers. I personally believe that much more of their "lost" revenue is attributable to shitty movies, ridiculous ticket prices, and more people choosing to wait and watch a movie in the comfort of their own home. Imagine if tobacco companies started suing PVC pipe manufacturers, b/c people were using their products to smoke pot, which is an illegal activity that directly cut into the sale of cigarettes. I don't see the MPAA's actions and rationalizations as being any more legitimate than that would be.
Just to play devil's advocate, say I vote Candidate A, and get a receipt showing I voted Candidate B. I go complain to the election officials. What happens when they say "Prove you voted Candidate A. Your receipt shows B, the machine says you voted B, how do we know it isn't just voter's remorse?"
Yeah, that is the standard theory, from what I read. What I am wondering, tho, is what they plan to do after the tube leaves the atmosphere, but before it is long enough to reach an anchor in geosyncronous orbit. My understanding is that the atmosphere only extends upwards some 75 miles or so. Geosyncronous orbits start somewhere around 20,000 miles up. So, between balloons (which top out around 75 miles up), and a geosyncronously orbiting counterweight (which start somewhere around 20,000 miles up), there is a whole lot of territory where the tube needs some alternate form of support.
The platform, a proprietary system that the company has named "HALE" (High Altitude Long Endurance), was secured in place by an arrangement of high altitude balloons, which were also used to launch it
Uhm, how useful will this be when they try to extend the elevator outside the atmosphere? Presumably, they have alternative methods worked out for stabilizing the zero-gravity portions, but somehow, Space Elevator == balloons is not nearly as exciting as Space Elevator == really cool new future technology.
I'll be excited when I can take the Space Elevator up to my penthouse suite at Hotel LaGrange. Unless, of course, I look out and see there are freaking balloons still involved.
Except that the reality is easy for anyone to see:
Which does not mean that very many people will really see it, though. If China's talking points were picked up by Western media, and repeated as though they had some validity, people would believe them, regardless of what reality actually is. This is actually a very clever thing for China to do; at the very least, it will instill some doubt in some people. It also gives a plausible deniability scenario to those who want to support China for various other reasons, but are afraid of being tarnished by the censorship issue. They can now point to this and say "Hey, we were misled by China. It's not that we support censorship, we just believed China when they said they only did the good kind."
Come on, China. I thought you could lie better than that.
It doesn't really matter how good the lie is. These days, it is quantity, not quality. It is better to repeat a bad lie one million times than a good one one thousand times. Ironically, this sort of media image manipulation actually is China simply following other countries' leads.
My question as well. TFA made mention of data-mining public information on the 'Net AND email. To me, these are two vastly different propositions. If they are merely spidering the Web, good on 'em. It is publicly available information; there is no expectation of privacy when I post this comment on a public forum such as/., so I don't see this as an invasion of privacy. However, I DO have an expectation of privacy in my personal correspondence, that I DID NOT make publicly available to anyone with Web access. As MikeRT points out, intercepting and data-mining my email is every bit as un-constitutional as the government opening and reading my snail-mail letters. Not to mention, costly and difficult to do quietly.
Having gotten that off my chest, I doubt the gov't is data-mining email. Much more likely is that the writer of the article doesn't understand the technical and legal distinctions between my/. comments and my email, but simply lumps them all in with "Internet stuff".
Good point; I overlooked that parsing. And that simply further demonstrates how hard it really is to map natural language queries (or statements) to Boolean, even tho it seems rather trivial at first. You end up having to make a lot of assumptions about what the natural language REALLY means.
Not quite right. For a naitive English speaker, the phrase "3 is more than 2 or 3" parses to 3 > (2 OR 3), the other option being (3 > 2) OR 3, which I agree is TRUE. Booelean distribution is a little tricky: [(3 > 2) OR (3 > 3)] != [3 > (2 OR 3)]. Distributing inequality requires that you to negate the Boolean operator, so you actually get [3 > (2 OR 3)] = [(3 > 2) AND (3 > 3)]. Since (3 > 3) = FALSE, the AND statement fails, making the value of the whole statement FALSE.
This is why my wife occassionally has trouble with Google: Boolean algebra is not obvious or trivial.
One factor that I think reduces the occurence of the smart-beautiful-charasmatic individuals is the fact that to excel at any of these requires effort. Being born with a high IQ does not necessarily mean that anyone will consider you smart at age 30. If you spend your life watching reality-TV and reading up on Brad and Angelina's baby in order to be able to "fit in", it is much less likely that you will fall into the "smart" category. On the other hand, if you are born physically attractive, and spend your life in flourescent lit rooms, eating junk food and caffeine as you study molecular biology, you most likely won't be high up on anyone "beautiful people" list.
I'm not saying that these qualities are necessarily mutually exclusive, just that a person's interests will generally develop one, often at the detriment of another.
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If Christ had lusted after a woman (or man for that matter), then he would have committed sin,...It's important that we understand the difference between temptation and the act itself.
I guess that is where the sticking point is for me: what means lust? Christ stated that you can sin in thought as well as deed. And obviously, lust is a sin of thought. So the sinful act is the act of thinking lustful thoughts. But what distinguishes a lustful, sinful thought from a not-quite lustful, merely tempted to sin thought?
Wow, its amazing the stuff you can learn on /.!!
I guess it boils down to what you mean by "lust after a woman". Is being horny considered lust? Or is it only lust if you fantasize? That's the problem I have with the whole "sinful thoughts are as bad as sinful actions" thing. Actions are concrete, easy to define. Thoughts, well, not so much. Where is the line between tempted to sin (which implies thinking about sin) and sinning in thought?
The only man who never lusted after a woman (or a man), was Jesus Christ.
I'll believe he didn't masturbate, or that he didn't fantasize about sex, but he never felt lust, i.e. horniness? Then he was not human, and did not face the same temptations to sin that every other man on the planet has at one point or another. Which is pretty contrary to the spirit of our salvation through his sacrifice.
Well, I don't know exactly how the GP meant his comment, but assuming he meant it the way I took it, he is somewhat correct :) Not that Europe or Asia don't have equally valid (or more so) cultures, but they have not been nearly as succesful in exporting their cultures to the global market. In the sense of gaining cultural* adoption by others, America is clearly unrivaled. Who doesn't drink Coke, watch Hollywood films, and listen to rock'n'roll?
* for certain debatable definitions of "culture"
In my experience, turning up X minutes late to avoid advertisements inevitably means that THIS movie only had X-10 minutes of advertisements.
Absolutely!! The only difference between Federal and State is the scale. Some people say Federal is too big to effectively govern certain aspects, State is the proper size, and point to the Constitution to back themselves up.
However, when the Constitution was framed, the Federal government was actually much smaller than the average State government today. At the time the Framers were drafting the Constitution, there were only about 3 million people in the whole country. And they decided that this was too many people to govern with a single monolithic government, that a single rule of law could not fit comfortably across so many people, except for the very limited areas in which they explicitly spelled out the Federal government's powers. Everything else required smaller, more personalized attention by the state governments to give people justice.
How big is the average state today?
The difference between the Internet and your theoretical public phone conversation is ease of access. You probably don't have millions of people following you every day, waiting for you to slip up and reveal something in a public phone conversation. How many scripts you think are floating around, eavesdropping on every unprotected exchange they find? You can walk around revealing personal information in public phone conversations, throw every pay stub out in your kitchen trash, and very easily never pay a price for your lack of vigilance, because no one is actively targetting you for this. On the Internet, EVERYONE is a targe, generally multiple times. The Internet brings economies of scale to what used to be the province of "dumpster divers".
Because it takes control from the market (which you are a part of) to an entity that does not always do the right thing.
Let me rephrase that for you.
Because it takes control from the market (which you are a part of and that does not always do the right thing) to an entity that does not always do the right thing, and you are a part of.
If you aren't a part of the government, it is only because you don't choose to be. Hell, even if you only vote, that probably gives you as much influence over the gov't as your $$ does over the market. Unless you spend a whole lot more than I do.
You're right; it is ridiculous that residents are serving 36 hour shifts on occasion. However, this has nothing to do with trying to see as many patients as possible. The residents could work just as many hours, and see just as many patients, working two 18 hour shifts, with a break in between. Hospital managers claim that it is a staffing issue, but I don't see how. From the doctors that I have spoken to about it, it is more of a "We had to do it as residents, now you have to do it" mentality than anything else. More of a hazing attitude than anything to do with greed.
They have purposely designed a system where they take as many patients as possible, and therefore have to work crazy hours.
I am kind of glad that the hospitals and clinics and such take "as many patients as possible". I'd rather get that doctor working at 30% capacity than try to diagnose my own case of necrotizing fasciitis b/c "Dr. Smith just had to go home and get his eight hours of sleep, just come back tomorrow when he is feeling nice and refreshed." Or do you think they can just add doctors to the rotations so that everyone's hours can be cut? They can't. There aren't exactly a lot of enemployed MDs sitting at home watching cartoons, you know. Not to mention the incredibly thin margins many public hospitals run on.
If doctors were really in it for the money, they would all be plastic surgeons.
will some of you learned people please tell me why it was good for FDR to monitor communications between Nazi and Imperial Japanese intelligence, and their assets here?...And why can't Bush do the same?
Assuming this happened, and assuming it was in fact good, there is still a pretty crucial difference that explains why Americans should not allow Bush to do the same. We were at war with Japan and Germany back then. We are not currently at war with anybody except Iraq. If this program was aimed at monitoring "domestic assets" attached to the Iraq insurgency, I would have less qualms about it. It is not. It is aimed at monitoring "domestic assets" of terrorists". We have already seen multiple examples of the term terrorist being misapplied to non-terrorist individuals, in order to take advantage of the lowered protections or harsher penalties associated with a terror crime. So, since drug dealers can now be charged as terrorists, my phone call to my brother who deals drugs in Canada can now be monitored under this program.*
Additionally, we knew WWII was over when Japan surrendered. When will the War on Terror end? Probably right after the War on Drugs... So, it is BAD for the government to assume additional powers against certain individuals when A) these individuals are NOT clearly defined, and often seem to simply be whoever law enforcement says they are, and B) the time period for these "temporary" measures is equally as fuzzy.
And if you don't buy that argument, how about the fact that when FDR did it, our duly appointed representatives in Congress had not yet laid down the explicit guidelines for how such behavior was to be gone about, so FDR wasn't going outside of those guidelines. Bush & company have specific guidelines saying "If you want to do this, you must do it in this manner." They did not do it in that manner, but instead said that these rules do not apply to them. It is a bad precendent to allow the President to decide which rules apply to him and which do not.
* My brother does not deal drugs in Canada.
Then why is everybody so surprised that the MPAA is trying to protect their products?
I don't think anyone is really surprised that the MPAA is trying to protect their products. I think what everyone is surprised/completely pissed off about is the fact that the MPAA is claiming such ridiculous losses due to piracy, and using these outrageous claims to "justify" forcing everyone to pay for their losses. The problem is, they have zero evidence to back up their numbers. I personally believe that much more of their "lost" revenue is attributable to shitty movies, ridiculous ticket prices, and more people choosing to wait and watch a movie in the comfort of their own home. Imagine if tobacco companies started suing PVC pipe manufacturers, b/c people were using their products to smoke pot, which is an illegal activity that directly cut into the sale of cigarettes. I don't see the MPAA's actions and rationalizations as being any more legitimate than that would be.
Just to play devil's advocate, say I vote Candidate A, and get a receipt showing I voted Candidate B. I go complain to the election officials. What happens when they say "Prove you voted Candidate A. Your receipt shows B, the machine says you voted B, how do we know it isn't just voter's remorse?"
The survey also showed that 34 percent of online men were surfing for fun on an average day in December
Well, I guess looking at porn is fun...
Yeah, I was only thinking of buliding up, not building down. In my defense, I'm stupid.
Ah! Very cool. Thank you, sir.
Yeah, that is the standard theory, from what I read. What I am wondering, tho, is what they plan to do after the tube leaves the atmosphere, but before it is long enough to reach an anchor in geosyncronous orbit. My understanding is that the atmosphere only extends upwards some 75 miles or so. Geosyncronous orbits start somewhere around 20,000 miles up. So, between balloons (which top out around 75 miles up), and a geosyncronously orbiting counterweight (which start somewhere around 20,000 miles up), there is a whole lot of territory where the tube needs some alternate form of support.
The platform, a proprietary system that the company has named "HALE" (High Altitude Long Endurance), was secured in place by an arrangement of high altitude balloons, which were also used to launch it
Uhm, how useful will this be when they try to extend the elevator outside the atmosphere? Presumably, they have alternative methods worked out for stabilizing the zero-gravity portions, but somehow, Space Elevator == balloons is not nearly as exciting as Space Elevator == really cool new future technology.
I'll be excited when I can take the Space Elevator up to my penthouse suite at Hotel LaGrange. Unless, of course, I look out and see there are freaking balloons still involved.
Except that the reality is easy for anyone to see:
Which does not mean that very many people will really see it, though. If China's talking points were picked up by Western media, and repeated as though they had some validity, people would believe them, regardless of what reality actually is. This is actually a very clever thing for China to do; at the very least, it will instill some doubt in some people. It also gives a plausible deniability scenario to those who want to support China for various other reasons, but are afraid of being tarnished by the censorship issue. They can now point to this and say "Hey, we were misled by China. It's not that we support censorship, we just believed China when they said they only did the good kind."
Come on, China. I thought you could lie better than that.
It doesn't really matter how good the lie is. These days, it is quantity, not quality. It is better to repeat a bad lie one million times than a good one one thousand times. Ironically, this sort of media image manipulation actually is China simply following other countries' leads.
My question as well. TFA made mention of data-mining public information on the 'Net AND email. To me, these are two vastly different propositions. If they are merely spidering the Web, good on 'em. It is publicly available information; there is no expectation of privacy when I post this comment on a public forum such as /., so I don't see this as an invasion of privacy. However, I DO have an expectation of privacy in my personal correspondence, that I DID NOT make publicly available to anyone with Web access. As MikeRT points out, intercepting and data-mining my email is every bit as un-constitutional as the government opening and reading my snail-mail letters. Not to mention, costly and difficult to do quietly.
/. comments and my email, but simply lumps them all in with "Internet stuff".
Having gotten that off my chest, I doubt the gov't is data-mining email. Much more likely is that the writer of the article doesn't understand the technical and legal distinctions between my
Yes, and kids are hereditary, too. If your parents didn't have any, there's a good chance you won't either.
Good point; I overlooked that parsing. And that simply further demonstrates how hard it really is to map natural language queries (or statements) to Boolean, even tho it seems rather trivial at first. You end up having to make a lot of assumptions about what the natural language REALLY means.
Not quite right. For a naitive English speaker, the phrase "3 is more than 2 or 3" parses to 3 > (2 OR 3), the other option being (3 > 2) OR 3, which I agree is TRUE. Booelean distribution is a little tricky: [(3 > 2) OR (3 > 3)] != [3 > (2 OR 3)]. Distributing inequality requires that you to negate the Boolean operator, so you actually get [3 > (2 OR 3)] = [(3 > 2) AND (3 > 3)]. Since (3 > 3) = FALSE, the AND statement fails, making the value of the whole statement FALSE.
This is why my wife occassionally has trouble with Google: Boolean algebra is not obvious or trivial.
One factor that I think reduces the occurence of the smart-beautiful-charasmatic individuals is the fact that to excel at any of these requires effort. Being born with a high IQ does not necessarily mean that anyone will consider you smart at age 30. If you spend your life watching reality-TV and reading up on Brad and Angelina's baby in order to be able to "fit in", it is much less likely that you will fall into the "smart" category. On the other hand, if you are born physically attractive, and spend your life in flourescent lit rooms, eating junk food and caffeine as you study molecular biology, you most likely won't be high up on anyone "beautiful people" list.
I'm not saying that these qualities are necessarily mutually exclusive, just that a person's interests will generally develop one, often at the detriment of another.