The game is calibrated so that one encounter is supposed to consume 1/4 of the party's resources, and that includes spells. 4 encounters a day. If the spellcaster is making it to the forth encounter before running dry, then it's not bad resource management; he's managed his resources in precisely the way the game expected him to. The game demands that the party pack it in for the night. It's just bad game design, and the developers know it, which is why they're cutting back so much on the "spells per day" mechanic.
You know, this whole problem could be solved easily by dropping the need for sleep in order ot prepare spells. Simply make preparing a spell take, say, 10 times the casting time (minimum of 10 rounds) of uninterrupted concentration times the spell level - meaning, basically, that if the casting time is 1 round and the spell level , you need to stay still and do nothing for 10 rounds (1 minute) to prepare it. As a result, the wizard can still run out of spells in a single encounter, easily, and he has a reason to not simply throw his strongest spell on a kobold; yet he can recover a bit between encounters.
This is simply a logical follow-up for the idea that prepared spells are actually almost-cast during preparation, lacking only a few keywords and -gestures which complete the spell and activate it.
Obviously the formula for the time needed for preparation should need to be tuned; I just pulled this one out of my ass:). But the basic idea is that you recover by avoiding strenuous activity for a while, rather than only while sleeping. Fighters and clerics could use a similar system for their per-day powers; heck, maybe a fighter who runs out of stamina could take a point or two of Constitution damage for a temporary boost for those critical life-and-death fights. Something similar for wizards, only now it is Intelligence damage; and clerics, well, clerics who overdraw on their deitys power would have Hell to pay later, literally.
I'm just happy they didn't make the 4th edition collectible.
Whatever makes you think they didn't ? The games and manga shop near me has shelf-meters of 3rd edition books. Why would the 4th edition be any different in that regard ?
Heck, there's the Players Guide describing character creation process and Monster Manual describing monsters, Savage Species to describe how to use monsters as characters, then Libris Mortis which describes undead monsters and and monster characters as well as a nonsensical explanation on how undead work; and that's just from Wizards itself.
But do you know what would be the scariest undead creature of them all ? The kind of lifeless nerd who collects (well, downloads) all of these books, reads them through, and thinks about whether the physics of undeath make sense while listening to the AMV Hell soundtrack, despite never once having actually played the game. The kind like... me.
Don't be ridiculous. This is the information age. Subdermal RFIDs are far more efficient than tattooed numbers. Harder to remove, too, if you implant them deep enough.
1) many seem to think they are done learning once they finish med school and get their practice going. They don't seem to have the research mentality that other scientists do.
They aren't scientists. They are basically equivalent to plumbers, except that they'll fix your body rather than your sewer. The doctors doing research are not the ones taking patients, and vice versus.
It is my understanding anti-retroviral treatment is very expensive. For this to have any effect on the spread of HIV, every infected person in the third world needs treatment.
Condoms, on the other hand, are cheap, effective, and also keep you from conceiving unless you want to, thus helping to solve the overpopulation problem. But the Pope happens to think that condoms are an insult to human dignity - but apparently dying from an easily preventable illness is not - so it isn't going to happen.
That isn't a government, even a primitive one: it isn't trying to govern.
Of course it is a government and is governing. It is simply limiting itself to mainly military matters and dispute arbitration - the latter because it does have to decide which one to back in the case two people disagree about the ownership of some particular property, if it is to do its protection function.
The moment they move beyond self-defense and proportional retribution -- e.g. by collecting taxes, or enforcing their own rules rather than protecting from aggression -- then they've become a government.
"You may not steal" is a rule, as is "You may not kill". "Retribution should be proportional" most certainly is a rule. You are trying to redefine and limit the term "government" to not cover those functions you happen to think are important to a society. That's fine, but simply because you don't want to call a governing body "government" doesn't change anything.
Responding to someone else's aggression (initiation of force, e.g. theft, murder, trespass, fraud) in kind is not unlawful behavior, or an property exclusive to governments.
Initiating force isn't unlawful behavior either, unless there is a law forbidding it. Lawful simply means adhering to laws. You could, of course, claim that not initiating force should be a law; but how is that any different from anyone claiming that you having to pay a certain portion of your income to pay for social security so people won't starve in the streets should be a law ? Either proposition is "obviously correct" to the people proposing it, yet I get a feeling that you wouldn't agree with the latter.
Anyway, the rest of your response ignores the question of numbers. You don't have to be personally stronger than the criminals so long as there are more people in your side than there are on theirs; in other words, so long as the majority of individuals are lawful in nature.
The concepts of "lawful" and "criminal" imply that there are laws, which in turn implies that someone is making them and using force - "people in your side" - to enforce them. In short, it implies that there is a government. No, what having lots of people in your side means is that you have might to force your rules on everyone who disagrees with them, which you are trying to justify by calling those dissenters "criminals". Pretty much what the current government does, eh ?
If people are lawful, on average, then government is superfluous; if they aren't lawful no form of government can improve the matter.
If there is no government there are no laws, so the concepts of lawfulness and lawlessness are nonsensical; what laws would they mean following or ignoring ? Unless, of course, you are trying to say that anyone who disagrees with your principles is a criminal, and should be brought down by the people in your side, in which case you are the government; a dictator, to be precise.
Welcome to the Dark Side, Lord Majestic (8=|. Hmmph, my Vader-smiley doesn't look so good...
In practice people already live in a state of anarchy in almost every relationship except taxation; that this situation is stable demonstrates, to me at least, that most individuals are lawful.
People indeed tend to adhere to laws. It still fails to show how they would react to absence of them. And it still fails to explain how are you going to keep the odd less-than-nice person from killing, robbing or otherwise harming you without enforcing rules of behavior through the threat of force.
econd: So-called "democratic" governments are only "accountable" to the majority vote, which is merely a form of "might makes right", this time in the form of numbers. The GP was clearly referring to accountability to justice, e.g. under common law, where anyone who causes another person harm is liable for the damage. No government, of any sort, considers itself accountable in this fashion; in fact, the definition of "government" can essentially be summed up as: the one group which is somehow not considered liable for the damage it causes.
Of course they aren't: after all, they're the ones who enforce the law.
It is impossible to enforce accountability on someone stronger or equal than you, without the help of a stronger entity still. In human societies, there are only a limited number of entities; consequently, there is always at least one for which there exists no stronger one. This strongest entity is usually called government. It isn't subject to law, for the simple reason that there is no one capable of forcing it to submit.
It's just the old problem: who is going to guard the guards ?
Third: Power is not a zero-sum game. Among other factors, power is limited by the willingness of those not in power to be governed by others. Eliminate the false sense of legitimacy they feel for the government and the total amount of power will decrease.
Incorrect. The total sum of all power is always equal to controlling every human beings every action. Remove power from the government and the people are free to do as they please; power hasn't been diminished, it has simply been transferred. Dissolve the government completely (which is a logical impossibility as noted above, but for the sake of argument...), and they are completely free.
Now, this might seem like a good thing, until you run into someone stronger than you. That someone, not being accountable to anyone anymore, has nothing to stop him from simply taking whatever he wants from you, possibly even your life. Now, most people don't to get robbed or killed, so people living close to one another will usually start looking out for each other, and making and enforcing rules like "don't steal" and "don't kill" by force - in other words, they form a (primitive) government.
Libertarianism seems really good on paper, but it is completely incompatible with both human nature and rational self-interest, so it won't work. And while i's good to realize that might doesn't make right, it is also worth noting that without might to back them, your rights aren't worth the *censored* piece of paper they're written on.
The really funny part is that it likely took a ton of money and a lot of time, yet the decision will become completely invalid and worthless in the space of 20 minutes, and for very little cost (basically - however long it takes for the average Joe Dane to find and learn how to use TOR).
Actually, with pretty much every client supporting trackerless torrents nowadays, Joe Dane won't have to do anything; it will simply take a bit longer for the torrent to find peers and pick up speed.
No, the real issue here is that the courts even tried. Nordic countries a nice place to live, but lately they have suffered from creeping copyrightism: Lex Karpela in Finland, the illegal raids and harrasment against the perfectly legal Pirate Bay in Sweden, and now a Danish court trying to make an ISP into a censorship enforcement agency. I hate seeing my home turning into yet another corporate state.
I guess this goes to show, once again, that copyright is fundamentally incompatible with any other rights and should be abolished completely. As long as it exists in any form, it will always seek to grow and increase its reach by one outrageous abuse of the legal system after another.
and the fact that she chose her potential political career over divorcing her adulterous husband - many times... which leaves some people wondering what her priorities are (power/influence > integrity/values)...
Bill gets caught fucking around and it's Hillary who gets accused of having no integrity ? WTF ?
This isn't ancient Rome, you know - getting vengeance is no longer considered a moral imperative, and failure to do so is not indicative of a character flaw. Except in the Imperial States of America, apparently.
I'm not really sure I disagree with him to be honest. I don't like the idea of forced vaccination. More importantly, I don't think it would work. If people don't believe a vaccination is safe they'll find some way to avoid it. Personally I'd take the vaccination if some terrorist group weaponized it, but the pros and cons of doing so seem to be sufficiently well balance that I don't agree with forcing other people to do do.
The question is, what would the effects of suddenly reintroducing smallpox into the population be ? Would the level of chaos caused both by deaths and the resulting panic be sufficient to endanger the society as a whole ? That is the criterion that should be used to decide whether or not forced immunization is neccessary.
This is why all political positions should be filled by multi-round voting: at each round, whoever gets the least votes is out of the race, so whoever is left is the least hated one. This also means that you can always vote whichever candidate of the remaining ones you want, since any vote to anyone besides Mister X will count against Mister X equally much no matter who it is given to.
There is bitter irony that Survivor has a better voting system than US presidential elections...
For future discussions, please use the term "The White Witch", just to keep things clear.
Seeing how the Deplorable Word is an allegory of weapons of mass destruction, and we're talking about a presidential candidate for the country with the largest nuclear stockpile in the world, I find this association somewhat disturbing.
The word "unborn" has about as much relevance to reality as the word "undead".
They are not words one uses to have an intelligent discussion with.
Both words have well-defined meanings. "Unborn" means something which hasn't been born yet. Not neccessarily a living thing, either; for example, if we don't figure out nuclear fusion soon, our future star empire dies unborn. And "undead", of course, refers to a formerly living thing which lacks metabolism but nevertheless retains animation; while there are no known examples of this phenomenom, the term itself is quite clear.
"Unborn" is usually used in the poetic sense, which may or may not fit your criterion of intelligent discussion. "Undead", on the other hand, can be used when discussing the myths of various cultures as a catch-all term for the dead but still goinnnggg - these myths are at the base of some of the more bizarre burial practices, such as burying the body to the ground and putting a large rock ("headstone") over it to keep it from re-emerging and haunting the living; unless you're arguing that anthropology is by definition unintelligent, I really don't think that you can claim the term unfit for intelligent discussion.
Well, as a parallel example, some states still have anti-sodomy laws on the record. If you were to recommend "enforcing those laws as written," don't you think people would be right to decry you as anti-gay?
Or should they consider him to be a baby-killer ? After all, anti-sodomy laws forbid a sexual practice which can't possibly result in pregnancy, while most forms of contraception are not 100% certain; consequently, enforcing anti-sodomy laws would lead to an increase in the rate of unwanted pregnancies, which in turn would lead to an increase in the rate of abortions. So, clearly anyone being against sodomy or homosexuality is for killing unborn babies - propably to eat their flesh in cannibalistic orgies to the tune of a black organ with flames coming from the pipes.
Reminds me of that old joke about a greenie going nuts over seeing an endangered animal eating an endangered plant in a preservation area:).
Think of the children - support sodomy, homosexuality and zoophilia ! Or just: Sodomites for Children !
When science comes up with a way to make a 40 year old's natural breasts perky again, then plastic surgeons will have to rethink their business model.
Simply implant an elastic support mesh anchored to the ribs or breastbone - a kind of an internal bra. You could make it from a net of tendons if you want the "natural" aspect.
"Purpose of grant: to keep large breasts from sagging and remove the need for a bra." I guess that's one way to get funding for stem cell research;)...
Ask yourself, how well could you provide for your family tomorrow if a New Orleans scale disaster hit your city? Only fools and sheep depend on others for their defence. It's YOUR life! Protect it!
It is nearly impossible to not depend on others. For example, can you forage or hunt your own food - without firearms, because if you use them, you'll depend on the guys who make the ammo, mine the metals for it, etc ?
The deeper understanding behind this is that sex isn't supposed an action of gratification for self, but it is a gift of self for the good of the other, and sex is such a profound gift of self (in the body) that through a direct act of God, it has the potential to create another.
However, if the other enjoys your gift, sex for her has now become an act of self-gratification. If self-gratification is a sin (which is completely illogical in itself; "gratification" simply means "satisfaction" or "pleasure" or source of them, so "self-gratification" would be anything you enjoy or get satisfaction from), and sin leads to death (as it does in all Christian dogmas I know of), you're "gift" is actually death in disguise.
The problem is ultimately caused by generations of obsessive-compulsive people claiming their personal hangups, quirks and oddities to be the will of God, and other people then taking them seriously and making theories based on these declarations. Of course the whole thing is a hopeless mess after two thousand years of this.
The ability to be a co-worker with God in His work of creation is a great gift; one that we need to use as is intended.
I'd say that it's the artists, engineers and architechts who come closest to doing God's work. So if this is your desire, get a pen and paper, or Blender if that's your preference, and start practicing.
For example, I don't think you would be too happy if you gave one of your kids a hammer as a gift and they decided to pound on the dog and not nails.
Do you realize that pounding on the dog with a hammer is going to hurt the dog, while conceiving children in a test tube is not going to harm anyone ? And if you do, why did you chose such an example when it isn't analogous with the test-tube baby situation ? Other than trying to associate opposing this doctrine with killing puppies with a hammer, that is ?
Apart from that, any example of the form "Imagine you're God" is unlikely to work, because you are not, in fact, God, and I find it extremely unlikely that you or any other mortal can imagine what it would be like to be God; most such attempts end up descriping a human with superpowers.
Like all mathematicians who believe that 1 + 1 = 2 or all software developers thinking that memory leaks are a bad thing?
Big difference between agreeing on verifiable facts and agreeing to have blind faith in something
The claim "1+1=2" is neither fact nor verifiable. What can be verified about it is that it follows logically from the basic axioms of mathemathics. Since these axioms aren't verifiable (by definition) neither are any claims based on them. Since the claim isn't verifiable, it can hardly be considered a fact either.
The claim "memory leaks are bad" isn't fact or verifiable either. The concept of "bad" is not well-defined, so any claim of the form "X is bad" is not well-defined either; and while "bad" does have a generally used (if vague) meaning, it is easy to imagine examples where software leaks don't coincide with it: Simply imagine that the software in question is controlling the detonation of a suitcase nuke planted into a large city by a terrorist group, but a memory leak causes it to crash and prevents the bomb from exploding. I'd say that would be anything but bad.
And yes, I'm posting this just because I feel like being contrarian and have nothing better to do on Friday night:(.
Almost true. You have been brainwashed to be a part of one of the largest and oldest for-profit power cults in the world.
You really think this is not about money and power? You need to read Sir James Frazer.
But but, if he reads Sir Frazer and is convinced to leave the church, doesn't that simply mean that Sir Frazer is well-versed in the art of manipulating people to take the choice he wants all the while thinking that it's their own choice ? Not that this is Sir Frazer's fault, because he too is merely being manipulated by other people, and they in turn by others.
Any decision you make is based on something, even if that something is flipping coins; so if we go down that road, we'll have to conclude that the entire concept of choice is flawed. You can't make choices free from external influences, and even if you could, this would make you a random-number generator - because any non-random element in the decision-making process means that whatever it is based on is influencing you.
Of course it might very well be that free choice is a flawed concept, but then it hardly makes sense to accuse Catholic Church of depriving its members of free choice, because they didn't have any to begin with. Or we could simply agree that by "free choice" we mean the lack of any obvious coercion, such as a gun being held to your head, and agree that such choices are attributed to whoever does them, even though we know that they are in reality the result of a deterministic chain of events starting from the Big Bang and quantum randomness, none of which the person in question is actually capable of affecting in any way.
Your choice, non-free as it might be;).
Please note that none of this in any way addresses any specific method(s) the Catholic Church might use in their indoctrination. It can't, because I'm not catholic and thus unfamiliar with those methods. I'm merely pointing out that it is impossible to avoid influencing and being influenced by people you interact with, so if the criteria of free choice is one free from any external influences, there is no such thing; and even if there was, it would merely be the equivalent of making a choice based on the output of a random number generator.
Once the sun was a god, because we had no way of understanding what it was. Currently, conception still carries a lot of metaphysics about it.
Wouldn't it be fun if turned out that plasma can is capable of sufficiently complex behavior to act as basis for life, and that some stars actually qualified as lifeforms ?-) Even more so if Sun was included in that bunch... For extra points, let's say that the ancient Sun-cults were actually based on telepathical interaction between Sun and the worshippers.
Imagine: The Pope and Richard Dawkins allying in their effort to redefine the concept of divinity in such a way that it doesn't include Helios, while some modern-day cultists keep on saying "Told you so". Slashdot flamefests like there has never been before (possibly literally if the Daystar itself decides to participate). Someone trying to sue the Sun for violating a patent about nuclear fusion.
And the best of all is that this post is completely on-topic speculating the religious impacts of a hypothethical lifeform:).
They run the tracker? Yes? Then, yes, the crap has been download through their site/tracker.
Not a single byte of the crap in question is sent through, to, or from the tracker in the BitTorrent protocol. All the tracker does is provide a locator service.
To take the example further: if I tell someone where they can buy coke - specifically tell them from whom and where, I'm sure I could get charged, too.
I guess that explains why the War on Drugs is not going so well: if you call the cops on the local crack dealer, you'll be sued.
Seriously, thought: this may or may not be illegal, but I don't think it should be. Such legislation would make it impossible to discuss the crime rates in various neighbourhoods, for example, because it is quite obvious that the areas where the drug dealers are most active are the places you should go to buy the stuff. It starts getting too close to thoughtcrime for my comfort.
if I go out to work each day and work my ass off to make movies, and you go work as a plumber, and then I see you watch the movies I work at for free, yet expect me to pay you if you do some plumbing, then that isn't sharing, its called 'freeloading' or 'leeching'.
No, that is called "stupidity": you are making movies instead of plumbing even when you know that plumbing pays better, and then complaining about this fact. Coming to think about it, perhaps "insanity" would be a better word, because "stupidity" would indicate that you simply didn't realize that making movies instead of plumbing doesn't pay; you did, you simply chose to ignore this fact, and complained because reality refused to change.
"Leeching" would be you trying to pass laws which help you make moeny from movies but screw everyone else, such as making removal or "circumvention" of copy protection illegal.
There is no right to profit from your work. There is a right to try to profit from your work. The difference is subtle but very important; and frankly, I'm starting to get more than a bit sick of the copyright creeps demanding that all society and technology bend over backwards to help them profit.
However realistic your observations might be in light of modern corporate "greed culture" (which is different how, from 19th-century "greed culture"?), your pessimistic attitude and lack of treatment of a core criterion betrays the fact that you've never worked for a non-profit.
I have. Said non-profit charity organization ignored both fire and work safety regulations, and had a culture of employees of all levels stealing the best bits of donations. Of course this could simply be a matter of a bad anecdote, but I can only use the data I have.
In contrast to the fundamental jadedness of your diatribe*, people working (not volunteering: working) for NPOs are typically 1) invested in the mission, 2) invested in the mission, and 3) invested in the mission.
The only mission the people I worked for were invested in was their personal gain at any means, ranging from outright theft (of donations to charity - how low can you get ?) to lying about their working hours, to using said working hours for personal business.
* Dude: I've been laid-off, too, by the Big National ISP That Ate the Little Hometown ISP Where I Worked(tm), so I know what it's like to write "thanatopsis documentation".
So, were you particularly motivated to do a good job at it ?
No, I'm merely trying to do as the marketing class always told us, and view this from the buyers point of view. It's not looking so good:(.
Something that is easy to replace is less valuable than something that is hard to replace.
Somone who is impossible to replace is impossible to promote
Perhaps. But this is only an impediment for the ambitious and confident, and even they can achieve promotions by changing jobs. Besides, we are heading towards a recession, so job security will propably count a lot more than advancement. Let's not forget that security is amongst the most basic needs.
On top of that, since this kind of move could be a precursor for layoffs or outsourcing, it is likely to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - and as we all know, people confronted by those tend to react by getting defensive and covering their back ("no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft").
Improving the process = making it more efficient = making it require less manpower = layoffs.
Improving the process = making it more efficient = making it require less manpower = increased capacity = PROFIT!!!
Good for the owners, but frankly, why should the employee care ? He's not going to benefit from it. And don't forget that laying off people to temporarily hike up the stock price is a standard trick nowadays; of course it is a stupid move in the long run, but by then the CEO has already gotten his bonuses.
In a way I can't help but think that business gets what it deserves. After all the outsourcing, layoffs to pump up the stock price, and abuses of at-will employment by control freaks, there is no trust left between the employees and employers. That means that whatever one does, the other will interpret in the worst possible way. This, in turn, makes it impossible to change anything, because any change is taken as some kind of devious plot, and sabotaged as such. In the long term, it would be much more profitable for everyone to build up sufficient trust that everyone works together rather than against one another; but that would benefit the future CEO and employees, rather than the ones making the decisions right now, who can benefit more if they screw the future for the sake of short-term profits, so it isn't bloody likely to happen. Which, in turn, really underlines why morality beyond mere rational self-interest is neccessary to have a prosperous society...
Slashdot Mirror
You know, this whole problem could be solved easily by dropping the need for sleep in order ot prepare spells. Simply make preparing a spell take, say, 10 times the casting time (minimum of 10 rounds) of uninterrupted concentration times the spell level - meaning, basically, that if the casting time is 1 round and the spell level , you need to stay still and do nothing for 10 rounds (1 minute) to prepare it. As a result, the wizard can still run out of spells in a single encounter, easily, and he has a reason to not simply throw his strongest spell on a kobold; yet he can recover a bit between encounters.
This is simply a logical follow-up for the idea that prepared spells are actually almost-cast during preparation, lacking only a few keywords and -gestures which complete the spell and activate it.
Obviously the formula for the time needed for preparation should need to be tuned; I just pulled this one out of my ass :). But the basic idea is that you recover by avoiding strenuous activity for a while, rather than only while sleeping. Fighters and clerics could use a similar system for their per-day powers; heck, maybe a fighter who runs out of stamina could take a point or two of Constitution damage for a temporary boost for those critical life-and-death fights. Something similar for wizards, only now it is Intelligence damage; and clerics, well, clerics who overdraw on their deitys power would have Hell to pay later, literally.
I shall call this... The GUTS system :).
Whatever makes you think they didn't ? The games and manga shop near me has shelf-meters of 3rd edition books. Why would the 4th edition be any different in that regard ?
Heck, there's the Players Guide describing character creation process and Monster Manual describing monsters, Savage Species to describe how to use monsters as characters, then Libris Mortis which describes undead monsters and and monster characters as well as a nonsensical explanation on how undead work; and that's just from Wizards itself.
But do you know what would be the scariest undead creature of them all ? The kind of lifeless nerd who collects (well, downloads) all of these books, reads them through, and thinks about whether the physics of undeath make sense while listening to the AMV Hell soundtrack, despite never once having actually played the game. The kind like... me.
Scream.
Don't be ridiculous. This is the information age. Subdermal RFIDs are far more efficient than tattooed numbers. Harder to remove, too, if you implant them deep enough.
They aren't scientists. They are basically equivalent to plumbers, except that they'll fix your body rather than your sewer. The doctors doing research are not the ones taking patients, and vice versus.
Condoms, on the other hand, are cheap, effective, and also keep you from conceiving unless you want to, thus helping to solve the overpopulation problem. But the Pope happens to think that condoms are an insult to human dignity - but apparently dying from an easily preventable illness is not - so it isn't going to happen.
Of course it is a government and is governing. It is simply limiting itself to mainly military matters and dispute arbitration - the latter because it does have to decide which one to back in the case two people disagree about the ownership of some particular property, if it is to do its protection function.
"You may not steal" is a rule, as is "You may not kill". "Retribution should be proportional" most certainly is a rule. You are trying to redefine and limit the term "government" to not cover those functions you happen to think are important to a society. That's fine, but simply because you don't want to call a governing body "government" doesn't change anything.
Initiating force isn't unlawful behavior either, unless there is a law forbidding it. Lawful simply means adhering to laws. You could, of course, claim that not initiating force should be a law; but how is that any different from anyone claiming that you having to pay a certain portion of your income to pay for social security so people won't starve in the streets should be a law ? Either proposition is "obviously correct" to the people proposing it, yet I get a feeling that you wouldn't agree with the latter.
The concepts of "lawful" and "criminal" imply that there are laws, which in turn implies that someone is making them and using force - "people in your side" - to enforce them. In short, it implies that there is a government. No, what having lots of people in your side means is that you have might to force your rules on everyone who disagrees with them, which you are trying to justify by calling those dissenters "criminals". Pretty much what the current government does, eh ?
If there is no government there are no laws, so the concepts of lawfulness and lawlessness are nonsensical; what laws would they mean following or ignoring ? Unless, of course, you are trying to say that anyone who disagrees with your principles is a criminal, and should be brought down by the people in your side, in which case you are the government; a dictator, to be precise.
Welcome to the Dark Side, Lord Majestic (8=|. Hmmph, my Vader-smiley doesn't look so good...
People indeed tend to adhere to laws. It still fails to show how they would react to absence of them. And it still fails to explain how are you going to keep the odd less-than-nice person from killing, robbing or otherwise harming you without enforcing rules of behavior through the threat of force.
Of course they aren't: after all, they're the ones who enforce the law.
It is impossible to enforce accountability on someone stronger or equal than you, without the help of a stronger entity still. In human societies, there are only a limited number of entities; consequently, there is always at least one for which there exists no stronger one. This strongest entity is usually called government. It isn't subject to law, for the simple reason that there is no one capable of forcing it to submit.
It's just the old problem: who is going to guard the guards ?
Incorrect. The total sum of all power is always equal to controlling every human beings every action. Remove power from the government and the people are free to do as they please; power hasn't been diminished, it has simply been transferred. Dissolve the government completely (which is a logical impossibility as noted above, but for the sake of argument...), and they are completely free.
Now, this might seem like a good thing, until you run into someone stronger than you. That someone, not being accountable to anyone anymore, has nothing to stop him from simply taking whatever he wants from you, possibly even your life. Now, most people don't to get robbed or killed, so people living close to one another will usually start looking out for each other, and making and enforcing rules like "don't steal" and "don't kill" by force - in other words, they form a (primitive) government.
Libertarianism seems really good on paper, but it is completely incompatible with both human nature and rational self-interest, so it won't work. And while i's good to realize that might doesn't make right, it is also worth noting that without might to back them, your rights aren't worth the *censored* piece of paper they're written on.
Actually, with pretty much every client supporting trackerless torrents nowadays, Joe Dane won't have to do anything; it will simply take a bit longer for the torrent to find peers and pick up speed.
No, the real issue here is that the courts even tried. Nordic countries a nice place to live, but lately they have suffered from creeping copyrightism: Lex Karpela in Finland, the illegal raids and harrasment against the perfectly legal Pirate Bay in Sweden, and now a Danish court trying to make an ISP into a censorship enforcement agency. I hate seeing my home turning into yet another corporate state.
I guess this goes to show, once again, that copyright is fundamentally incompatible with any other rights and should be abolished completely. As long as it exists in any form, it will always seek to grow and increase its reach by one outrageous abuse of the legal system after another.
Bill gets caught fucking around and it's Hillary who gets accused of having no integrity ? WTF ?
This isn't ancient Rome, you know - getting vengeance is no longer considered a moral imperative, and failure to do so is not indicative of a character flaw. Except in the Imperial States of America, apparently.
The question is, what would the effects of suddenly reintroducing smallpox into the population be ? Would the level of chaos caused both by deaths and the resulting panic be sufficient to endanger the society as a whole ? That is the criterion that should be used to decide whether or not forced immunization is neccessary.
This is why all political positions should be filled by multi-round voting: at each round, whoever gets the least votes is out of the race, so whoever is left is the least hated one. This also means that you can always vote whichever candidate of the remaining ones you want, since any vote to anyone besides Mister X will count against Mister X equally much no matter who it is given to.
There is bitter irony that Survivor has a better voting system than US presidential elections...
Seeing how the Deplorable Word is an allegory of weapons of mass destruction, and we're talking about a presidential candidate for the country with the largest nuclear stockpile in the world, I find this association somewhat disturbing.
Both words have well-defined meanings. "Unborn" means something which hasn't been born yet. Not neccessarily a living thing, either; for example, if we don't figure out nuclear fusion soon, our future star empire dies unborn. And "undead", of course, refers to a formerly living thing which lacks metabolism but nevertheless retains animation; while there are no known examples of this phenomenom, the term itself is quite clear.
"Unborn" is usually used in the poetic sense, which may or may not fit your criterion of intelligent discussion. "Undead", on the other hand, can be used when discussing the myths of various cultures as a catch-all term for the dead but still goinnnggg - these myths are at the base of some of the more bizarre burial practices, such as burying the body to the ground and putting a large rock ("headstone") over it to keep it from re-emerging and haunting the living; unless you're arguing that anthropology is by definition unintelligent, I really don't think that you can claim the term unfit for intelligent discussion.
Or should they consider him to be a baby-killer ? After all, anti-sodomy laws forbid a sexual practice which can't possibly result in pregnancy, while most forms of contraception are not 100% certain; consequently, enforcing anti-sodomy laws would lead to an increase in the rate of unwanted pregnancies, which in turn would lead to an increase in the rate of abortions. So, clearly anyone being against sodomy or homosexuality is for killing unborn babies - propably to eat their flesh in cannibalistic orgies to the tune of a black organ with flames coming from the pipes.
Reminds me of that old joke about a greenie going nuts over seeing an endangered animal eating an endangered plant in a preservation area :).
Think of the children - support sodomy, homosexuality and zoophilia ! Or just: Sodomites for Children !
Simply implant an elastic support mesh anchored to the ribs or breastbone - a kind of an internal bra. You could make it from a net of tendons if you want the "natural" aspect.
"Purpose of grant: to keep large breasts from sagging and remove the need for a bra." I guess that's one way to get funding for stem cell research ;)...
It is nearly impossible to not depend on others. For example, can you forage or hunt your own food - without firearms, because if you use them, you'll depend on the guys who make the ammo, mine the metals for it, etc ?
However, if the other enjoys your gift, sex for her has now become an act of self-gratification. If self-gratification is a sin (which is completely illogical in itself; "gratification" simply means "satisfaction" or "pleasure" or source of them, so "self-gratification" would be anything you enjoy or get satisfaction from), and sin leads to death (as it does in all Christian dogmas I know of), you're "gift" is actually death in disguise.
The problem is ultimately caused by generations of obsessive-compulsive people claiming their personal hangups, quirks and oddities to be the will of God, and other people then taking them seriously and making theories based on these declarations. Of course the whole thing is a hopeless mess after two thousand years of this.
I'd say that it's the artists, engineers and architechts who come closest to doing God's work. So if this is your desire, get a pen and paper, or Blender if that's your preference, and start practicing.
Do you realize that pounding on the dog with a hammer is going to hurt the dog, while conceiving children in a test tube is not going to harm anyone ? And if you do, why did you chose such an example when it isn't analogous with the test-tube baby situation ? Other than trying to associate opposing this doctrine with killing puppies with a hammer, that is ?
Apart from that, any example of the form "Imagine you're God" is unlikely to work, because you are not, in fact, God, and I find it extremely unlikely that you or any other mortal can imagine what it would be like to be God; most such attempts end up descriping a human with superpowers.
The claim "1+1=2" is neither fact nor verifiable. What can be verified about it is that it follows logically from the basic axioms of mathemathics. Since these axioms aren't verifiable (by definition) neither are any claims based on them. Since the claim isn't verifiable, it can hardly be considered a fact either.
The claim "memory leaks are bad" isn't fact or verifiable either. The concept of "bad" is not well-defined, so any claim of the form "X is bad" is not well-defined either; and while "bad" does have a generally used (if vague) meaning, it is easy to imagine examples where software leaks don't coincide with it: Simply imagine that the software in question is controlling the detonation of a suitcase nuke planted into a large city by a terrorist group, but a memory leak causes it to crash and prevents the bomb from exploding. I'd say that would be anything but bad.
And yes, I'm posting this just because I feel like being contrarian and have nothing better to do on Friday night :(.
But but, if he reads Sir Frazer and is convinced to leave the church, doesn't that simply mean that Sir Frazer is well-versed in the art of manipulating people to take the choice he wants all the while thinking that it's their own choice ? Not that this is Sir Frazer's fault, because he too is merely being manipulated by other people, and they in turn by others.
Any decision you make is based on something, even if that something is flipping coins; so if we go down that road, we'll have to conclude that the entire concept of choice is flawed. You can't make choices free from external influences, and even if you could, this would make you a random-number generator - because any non-random element in the decision-making process means that whatever it is based on is influencing you.
Of course it might very well be that free choice is a flawed concept, but then it hardly makes sense to accuse Catholic Church of depriving its members of free choice, because they didn't have any to begin with. Or we could simply agree that by "free choice" we mean the lack of any obvious coercion, such as a gun being held to your head, and agree that such choices are attributed to whoever does them, even though we know that they are in reality the result of a deterministic chain of events starting from the Big Bang and quantum randomness, none of which the person in question is actually capable of affecting in any way.
Your choice, non-free as it might be ;).
Please note that none of this in any way addresses any specific method(s) the Catholic Church might use in their indoctrination. It can't, because I'm not catholic and thus unfamiliar with those methods. I'm merely pointing out that it is impossible to avoid influencing and being influenced by people you interact with, so if the criteria of free choice is one free from any external influences, there is no such thing; and even if there was, it would merely be the equivalent of making a choice based on the output of a random number generator.
Wouldn't it be fun if turned out that plasma can is capable of sufficiently complex behavior to act as basis for life, and that some stars actually qualified as lifeforms ?-) Even more so if Sun was included in that bunch... For extra points, let's say that the ancient Sun-cults were actually based on telepathical interaction between Sun and the worshippers.
Imagine: The Pope and Richard Dawkins allying in their effort to redefine the concept of divinity in such a way that it doesn't include Helios, while some modern-day cultists keep on saying "Told you so". Slashdot flamefests like there has never been before (possibly literally if the Daystar itself decides to participate). Someone trying to sue the Sun for violating a patent about nuclear fusion.
And the best of all is that this post is completely on-topic speculating the religious impacts of a hypothethical lifeform :).
Not a single byte of the crap in question is sent through, to, or from the tracker in the BitTorrent protocol. All the tracker does is provide a locator service.
I guess that explains why the War on Drugs is not going so well: if you call the cops on the local crack dealer, you'll be sued.
Seriously, thought: this may or may not be illegal, but I don't think it should be. Such legislation would make it impossible to discuss the crime rates in various neighbourhoods, for example, because it is quite obvious that the areas where the drug dealers are most active are the places you should go to buy the stuff. It starts getting too close to thoughtcrime for my comfort.
No, that is called "stupidity": you are making movies instead of plumbing even when you know that plumbing pays better, and then complaining about this fact. Coming to think about it, perhaps "insanity" would be a better word, because "stupidity" would indicate that you simply didn't realize that making movies instead of plumbing doesn't pay; you did, you simply chose to ignore this fact, and complained because reality refused to change.
"Leeching" would be you trying to pass laws which help you make moeny from movies but screw everyone else, such as making removal or "circumvention" of copy protection illegal.
There is no right to profit from your work. There is a right to try to profit from your work. The difference is subtle but very important; and frankly, I'm starting to get more than a bit sick of the copyright creeps demanding that all society and technology bend over backwards to help them profit.
Face the grim reality of propably never having grandchildren ?-) Seriously, only on Slashdot...
I have. Said non-profit charity organization ignored both fire and work safety regulations, and had a culture of employees of all levels stealing the best bits of donations. Of course this could simply be a matter of a bad anecdote, but I can only use the data I have.
The only mission the people I worked for were invested in was their personal gain at any means, ranging from outright theft (of donations to charity - how low can you get ?) to lying about their working hours, to using said working hours for personal business.
So, were you particularly motivated to do a good job at it ?
No, I'm merely trying to do as the marketing class always told us, and view this from the buyers point of view. It's not looking so good :(.
Perhaps. But this is only an impediment for the ambitious and confident, and even they can achieve promotions by changing jobs. Besides, we are heading towards a recession, so job security will propably count a lot more than advancement. Let's not forget that security is amongst the most basic needs.
On top of that, since this kind of move could be a precursor for layoffs or outsourcing, it is likely to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - and as we all know, people confronted by those tend to react by getting defensive and covering their back ("no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft").
Good for the owners, but frankly, why should the employee care ? He's not going to benefit from it. And don't forget that laying off people to temporarily hike up the stock price is a standard trick nowadays; of course it is a stupid move in the long run, but by then the CEO has already gotten his bonuses.
In a way I can't help but think that business gets what it deserves. After all the outsourcing, layoffs to pump up the stock price, and abuses of at-will employment by control freaks, there is no trust left between the employees and employers. That means that whatever one does, the other will interpret in the worst possible way. This, in turn, makes it impossible to change anything, because any change is taken as some kind of devious plot, and sabotaged as such. In the long term, it would be much more profitable for everyone to build up sufficient trust that everyone works together rather than against one another; but that would benefit the future CEO and employees, rather than the ones making the decisions right now, who can benefit more if they screw the future for the sake of short-term profits, so it isn't bloody likely to happen. Which, in turn, really underlines why morality beyond mere rational self-interest is neccessary to have a prosperous society...