There's no reason that amount of total area won should mean anything at all. Moreover, there's no reason you can reasonably object to cities dominating simply because they happen to be dense areas. Disagreeing with a group doesn't mean you get to use essentially arbitrary criteria to decide you'd like to ignore their wishes.
Social and political interests tend to have a heavy coincidence with geography. If you are on the coasts you care way more about the fishing industry than people in the heartland. If you are in a desert you care more about water conservation. If you are near oil and natural gas your livelihood or the livelihood of your neighbors probably depends on the energy industry. By virtue of being in a population dense area, you automatically have a powerful voting block on various area specific issues. What's more, the people in other areas are not your neighbors, you have much less incentive to protect their interests, and are much less likely to hear their anger and complaints when you don't. By and large people from Wisconsin are not going to be able to come and protest march down the streets of LA if California -- 8 x the population of Wisconsin -- decides corn should be taxed to subsidize making action movies.
The electoral college helps protect various minority populations from being exploited by a tyrannous majority. And that is the main point of our republic, why it is based on constitutional rights, competing branches of government (one of which is not voted on), an electoral college, etc., and super majorities are required to enact any substantial changes. Our government is not a mechanism for enacting the will of the 51% (or even the 60%) on every issue, it is built as a balance of interests which makes the government accountable to the people while also making it fairly difficult for any one group of people to use the government as a cudgel against another group.
mandate that families hold funerals for miscarried or aborted fetuses
This was so crazy that I had to look it up. Turns out "hold a funeral" is "dispose of remains properly" -- the bill required that fetal remains be either interred or incinerated. Generally speaking that would be the responsibility of the healthcare facility in custody of the remains.
Tell me straight, is "require families to hold a funeral" truly the most accurate and reasonable way you could come up with to indicate the nature of the bill, or is it a purposeful deception?
Surely it is very clearly marked "will release noxious gas if cut" and is therefore not a boobytrap? As far as I'm aware you can, e.g., electrify a fence, you just have to put up appropriate signage. It is cheaper and more effective to deter thieves from trying the lock in the first place than to actually release the gas.
Wikileaks has obtained a list of Trump's most damaging electronic communications and compiled them her for public viewing: https://twitter.com/realDonald...
That depends on how the simulation is implemented. If it's implemented as an electrical current that requires a constant voltage, then sure, you can flip an off switch and at the speed of light it will blink out of existence. But if you were simulating a town by 3D printing it, that would have persistence, and certainly the little towns people, if they were animated, could walk outside the bounds on their village and continue to exist and interact with things outside the simulation.
Since we have no idea what the governing physics might be of the "next level" there is no reason to suppose one or the other. Honestly, what guarantee do we have that our meat-based calculation organs are even physically capable of contemplating its properties?
The quantity of self-described religious adherents who don't go to church, don't pray, and don't think much about the afterlife (until the due date visibly approaches) is frankly quite large. Belief != fervor. And, proportionally, there's quite a few places dedicated to bringing atheists together and promulgating their beliefs (tax exempt by the way).
As humans, we seek explanations, stake our identity in our beliefs, and pursue fellowship with those who share them. I know of at least one secular group in my city that explicitly claims to be a church ("The Church of Beethoven"). There are definitely distinctions between believing in historically established religion and believing in some form of modern secularism. But atheists like to phrase it as "We don't have any of the pitfalls of religion because we don't have religion" and it sounds an awful lot like monotheists claiming they don't have any of the pitfalls of being pagan.
Netflix experienced a golden age where they were the only sensible option for making your content available for streaming and they offered enough additional exposure to make that profitable and desirable. But it's easy enough to cut them out and deliver the content yourself. You can make even more money selling an exclusive licence to Hulu, Prime, etc. Netflix can't offer a wide variety of content if no one is licensing it to them.
Producing original content is actually the solution. If Netflix can say, "Fine, don't license us your show, we'll just make our own in the same genre with a very similar premise" then they have much more negotiating power to avoid losing access.
If there was a 0.1% chance of killing yourself on an insulin injection and you were diabetic, that would be a serious issue, because you would take that risk every day. But your chances of going into anaphylactic shock and dying are rather low, even if you have serious allergies (only about ~200 people per year actually do wind up dying), and a 0.1% chance of dying in a 1/100000 scenario puts it in the category of daily hazards most of us regard as non-concerns. So unless those factors you mention are VERY likely to kill you, I would call this a fairly decent option.
Some of those risks are also easy to minimize. E.g., there's absolutely no risk of overdosing if you only carry a supply/syringe at your rated dose.
When you're at a lower player level, it's lots of fun. Once you've caught most of the local pokemon it soon turns into simple grinding, however --- catching the same common pokemon to get XP, which you need more and more of to increase your level. You also get hugely shortchanged by not being in a major city. The presence of pokestops (necessary sources of in-game items) and more importantly pokemon are tied to where people aggregate. In a small city you will find a fraction of the quantity and of the variety in a big city.
Personally I don't play many games anymore because of the time commitment. Pokemon Go is actually awesome in that respect because for the most part you can only play it wondering around, no temptation to keep playing once you get home or to the office.
I have kept playing in the hopes that the gameplay would improve. But I'm pretty close to quitting myself. Hopefully they can make it enjoyable again before they hemorrhage all of their community.
Keep in mind that by sending earth microbes we're giving life there a 3.8 billion year head start. How long is it going to take to have an intelligent species? Probably somewhere between "relatively soon" and "never" with the exact timing left to some genetic rolls of the dice. What if we choose other colonization targets later on? Will we sterilize the discarded planet (presumably difficult and costly) or let it continue evolving? What if a species optimizing for intelligence turns out to be much smarter than we are and covers technological ground in exponentially faster time? Do we want to setup potential competitors directly in our own small corner of the galaxy? Or what about the threat of simple microbes? It's unlikely that if we encounter extraterrestrial microbes that they will be adapted to our bodies in a way that they can infect us, but seems to me earth microbes would stand a much better chance of evolving potentially compatible pathogens.
There may be wisdom in spearheading our colonization efforts, but I think we ought to wait on having the technology to directly monitor and manage it. Trusting that whatever evolution spits out is going to be to our direct benefit seems like an unnecessary gamble.
You aren't being denied advertising dollars. There are no advertising dollars. What people pay for is to piggy back off the sense of interest and enjoyment your media creates to sell merchandise. Your documentary highlighting the horrors of dying of trenchfoot in WWI is not going to do that, and in fact an advertisement which doesn't fit the somber mood will probably piss people off. Your video might well be an exception, but it's probably not worth Youtube's time to watch it, interpret it, and decide whether it's actually going to help them sell toilet paper. You might as well complain that other videos are getting 10 million views while yours is only getting 10. If the advertising model doesn't work for the content you're creating you can still make money off of selling it directly. Or you could sell advertisements in your videos yourself, you just won't have the benefit of youtube's analytics to determine clicks.
Journalism is almost entirely taking "snippets" from other people in the form of quotes and information and compiling them into a story, so I must assume the newspapers will also be paying out royalties on their articles to anyone they interview, mention, or quote (including when they search for comments on twitter and facebook as they like to do now).
"Intent" is difficult to demonstrate given that it lives in the minds of the accused. The website itself is based on content-agnostic algorithms. I'm sure it's true that it has a higher percentage of illicit use than google does, but that's probably true of Tor and VPN services as well. Would we be comfortable shutting those down on the same justification?
Personally, I find it hard to find any "good intent" behind hosting, e.g., The Anarchists Cookbook. But it's well-established that that doing so is protected speech. Is pointing people to IPs where they can request to receive copyrighted bits of information more insidious than pointing people to how they can make a pipebomb?
I am fine with shutting down criminally entrenched websites and prosecuting the persons involved. But the free speech protections we are promised in the US are quite broad and in almost all cases we refuse to risk weakening that simply to avoid the possibility of mischief. If Google can deliver 10% questionable content under that protection then I think someone who delivers 90% questionable content must be protected as well. I don't see how the fundamental nature of the right could change simply because we get more day-to-day value out of google.
We could enforce the law by, you know, going after the people actually breaking copyright by uploading and downloading copyrighted material.
I represent someone in that demographic from a small engineering school. Among my admittedly non-mainstream group of friends I'd guess at least half know what KDE is. I'm not sure how many actually use it vs. GNOME, but it's common for them to have a Linux or Mac laptop. Laptops have become work devices -- they're what you take to project and study groups. *nix works great for that, and easy to get everyone using the same software (within a college student's budget, no less). I'm sure other places are different, but one anecdote deserves another.
That's not a great approach for discerning medical ethics. At the point your justification for medical experiments is, "in the long term there could be (as yet undemonstrated) major benefits" I don't think there is a single experiment you could not rationalize.
This overlooks that A, B, and C are competitively selected, actively maneuvering to win, and influenced by previous results.
E.g., if B is slated to lose because C is attracting more liberal voters, B is likely to move left in order to capture those voters. Or if B2012 wasn't left enough B2016 may be someone more of that bent. Also, a disliked presidential candidate tends to depress the party's congressional holdings, which makes it more difficult to enact their agenda, and tends to setup a win for the opposing candidate in the next term.
Furthermore, in democracies votes don't merely decide outcomes, they legitimize them. If 100% of the population votes and 90% vote for Hitler because the alternative is Stalin, at that point he basically has a mandate. If only 5% of the population votes and 90% votes for Hitler, I would say an uprising is well within bounds.
Voting your conscience may not net you specific near term outcomes that you desire. But in the long run your vote is a commodity politicians value and they will shape their policies to obtain it. Unless, of course, they can obtain it some other way, such as simply by pointing out their opponent is on the left/right side. If you're going to lock in on that, then you've already spent your opinion as far as they're concerned. The only way to control politicians is to be completely willing to withhold the thing they need and value -- victory. If you let the parties blackmail *you* with outcomes, then they are the ones in control, and that will be obvious by the fact the people are only given choices (Hillary/Trump) that a sound majority of them dislike.
I am against ever taking life where it can be avoided, so I oppose the choice of action by the police unless they were resolving some imminent danger to themselves or to the public.
But "due process" was not violated. If you want the protection of the court system you have to cooperate with the system. If you skip town, you get tried in absentia. If you refuse a defense attorney, the case proceeds without one. If you shoot at the people trying to take you peacefully to court, you may not get to be taken peacefully to court.
If I may, as a person who considers themselves Christian, I would like to address your points from the perspective of my own religious understanding.
To say there is no replacement of the old testament rules to ignore vast portions, perhaps even the majority, of the new testament writings. Jesus changed marriage requirements, the punishment for adultery, reinterpreted the sabbath rules and the rules for cleanliness. After his resurrection he appears to Peter and rescinds the rules on clean and unclean, not to mention that huge recurring bit from Paul et al. about circumcision not being necessary, etc. Old testament law is a covenant between God and the Jewish people, a covenant which Christ ultimately fulfils.
Christianity is in every case a peaceful religion. Jesus never injured anyone, and whatever self-serving arguments some might come up with to justify behavior, the core of Christianity is to put your faith in Christ and become like him in every way. His life stands as an irrefutable counter-argument to any violent perversion of biblical teachings that you or I might come up with, because there is no way to do violence without violating his example.
Part of being a peaceful religion is that Christianity does not seek to overthrow governments or institutions. It instead seeks to change people by witnessing in example to them.
You do not go to hell for not believing. You go to hell for committing evil. Unholy things cannot be united with a holy God. If that sounds unpalatable, apparently Christ agreed, since he was willing to suffer and die to circumvent that on your behalf. Do all non-believers (upon death) go to hell without any secondary consideration? Some people do think that, but that's not laid out in any clear fashion. What is clear is that if you repent of evil deeds and choose Christ's path instead, you may have ever confidence of remaining in that forever.
As long we apply this to every single other political issue which exists. Because gun rights is just as validly "pro-choice" vs. "anti-choice." And school vouchers. And if cities/states choose to implement capital punishment. Etc. Or do you have a particular reason why "choice" is a word which politically is only about abortion and nothing else?
Personally, I really hate this Orwellian crap where you try to win your ideological battles by modifying the dictionary. Pro-abortion/anti-abortion clearly defines the territorial ground (and frankly gives abortion supporters the slightly more favorable "pro" adjective).
The point where you want 'pro-choice' to go alongside 'anti-abortion' because of your claims about what else your political side represents. . . that is a ridiculous self-serving waste of everyone's time. How does it sound if I say, "People who support a broad second amendment interpretation are actually ANTI-GUN because increasing legal carriers deters criminal gun use"?
Microsoft bundling IE in its capacity as the by far dominant provider of desktop operating systems was considered an anti-trust violation.
Now what about the by far most dominant social network bundling a particular political platform for its users? Is there no ethical problem with that?
I agree that FB's actions are legal and even constitutionally protected. But if you find it unnerving when companies hire lobbyists to write laws in their favor, you should probably find it even more unnerving that FB may be surreptitiously packaging the specific issues and views on which people vote.
I wonder what the monetary value to Trump/Hillary would be to suppressing news helpful to their opponent, and what sort of favorable legislation that could buy FB in return.
Why wouldn't the cars communicate? That will be important for optimizing traffic flow anyway. They could share imaging data, or time their pings to not interfere with each other. In high traffic areas it could make sense to offload all the sensing and even decision making to a roadside system.
As compelling as it might be to recast all heroes as Democrats and all villains as Republicans... I'm pretty sure the more conservative party is automatically a closer approximation for anyone born two-hundred years ago. I'm also not quite seeing the exchange of ideologies bit. If you were to interview Harriet Tubman today, on what defining Democrat issues (abortion, gay rights, gun control, universal health care, income inequality, etc.) does she sound like more like a contemporary Democrat than a contemporary Republican?
The NYTimes has an 8-page exposé on how an online business is thriving because of giant amounts of negative reviews. It seems that if you directly google the company you have no problem discerning the true nature; but if you instead only google the brand names it sells, the company is at the top of the rankings. Turns out that all the negative advertisement he generates from reputable sites gives him countless links that inflate his pagerank.
I mean, there's also a reason he is revealing it was a hoax. The 'it was a hoax' articles will do damage control while also doubling his exposure. I presume they'll come up first in searches, being newer. Would this be a as great as getting your name out there in a positive light in the first place? No. But everyone else is trying to do the same thing, and it's expensive. This was effective and free. Not everyone will appreciate the joke and some potential customers will be lost. But the potential customers when no one knows about you is zero. I'd say wait and see how the company is doing in a couple of years before denying it was a good play.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no reason that amount of total area won should mean anything at all. Moreover, there's no reason you can reasonably object to cities dominating simply because they happen to be dense areas. Disagreeing with a group doesn't mean you get to use essentially arbitrary criteria to decide you'd like to ignore their wishes.
Social and political interests tend to have a heavy coincidence with geography. If you are on the coasts you care way more about the fishing industry than people in the heartland. If you are in a desert you care more about water conservation. If you are near oil and natural gas your livelihood or the livelihood of your neighbors probably depends on the energy industry. By virtue of being in a population dense area, you automatically have a powerful voting block on various area specific issues. What's more, the people in other areas are not your neighbors, you have much less incentive to protect their interests, and are much less likely to hear their anger and complaints when you don't. By and large people from Wisconsin are not going to be able to come and protest march down the streets of LA if California -- 8 x the population of Wisconsin -- decides corn should be taxed to subsidize making action movies.
The electoral college helps protect various minority populations from being exploited by a tyrannous majority. And that is the main point of our republic, why it is based on constitutional rights, competing branches of government (one of which is not voted on), an electoral college, etc., and super majorities are required to enact any substantial changes. Our government is not a mechanism for enacting the will of the 51% (or even the 60%) on every issue, it is built as a balance of interests which makes the government accountable to the people while also making it fairly difficult for any one group of people to use the government as a cudgel against another group.
mandate that families hold funerals for miscarried or aborted fetuses
This was so crazy that I had to look it up. Turns out "hold a funeral" is "dispose of remains properly" -- the bill required that fetal remains be either interred or incinerated. Generally speaking that would be the responsibility of the healthcare facility in custody of the remains.
Tell me straight, is "require families to hold a funeral" truly the most accurate and reasonable way you could come up with to indicate the nature of the bill, or is it a purposeful deception?
Surely it is very clearly marked "will release noxious gas if cut" and is therefore not a boobytrap? As far as I'm aware you can, e.g., electrify a fence, you just have to put up appropriate signage. It is cheaper and more effective to deter thieves from trying the lock in the first place than to actually release the gas.
Wikileaks has obtained a list of Trump's most damaging electronic communications and compiled them her for public viewing: https://twitter.com/realDonald...
That depends on how the simulation is implemented. If it's implemented as an electrical current that requires a constant voltage, then sure, you can flip an off switch and at the speed of light it will blink out of existence. But if you were simulating a town by 3D printing it, that would have persistence, and certainly the little towns people, if they were animated, could walk outside the bounds on their village and continue to exist and interact with things outside the simulation.
Since we have no idea what the governing physics might be of the "next level" there is no reason to suppose one or the other. Honestly, what guarantee do we have that our meat-based calculation organs are even physically capable of contemplating its properties?
What is the difference if you are not prepared? Will you fail at it?
The quantity of self-described religious adherents who don't go to church, don't pray, and don't think much about the afterlife (until the due date visibly approaches) is frankly quite large. Belief != fervor. And, proportionally, there's quite a few places dedicated to bringing atheists together and promulgating their beliefs (tax exempt by the way).
As humans, we seek explanations, stake our identity in our beliefs, and pursue fellowship with those who share them. I know of at least one secular group in my city that explicitly claims to be a church ("The Church of Beethoven"). There are definitely distinctions between believing in historically established religion and believing in some form of modern secularism. But atheists like to phrase it as "We don't have any of the pitfalls of religion because we don't have religion" and it sounds an awful lot like monotheists claiming they don't have any of the pitfalls of being pagan.
Netflix experienced a golden age where they were the only sensible option for making your content available for streaming and they offered enough additional exposure to make that profitable and desirable. But it's easy enough to cut them out and deliver the content yourself. You can make even more money selling an exclusive licence to Hulu, Prime, etc. Netflix can't offer a wide variety of content if no one is licensing it to them.
Producing original content is actually the solution. If Netflix can say, "Fine, don't license us your show, we'll just make our own in the same genre with a very similar premise" then they have much more negotiating power to avoid losing access.
If there was a 0.1% chance of killing yourself on an insulin injection and you were diabetic, that would be a serious issue, because you would take that risk every day. But your chances of going into anaphylactic shock and dying are rather low, even if you have serious allergies (only about ~200 people per year actually do wind up dying), and a 0.1% chance of dying in a 1/100000 scenario puts it in the category of daily hazards most of us regard as non-concerns. So unless those factors you mention are VERY likely to kill you, I would call this a fairly decent option.
Some of those risks are also easy to minimize. E.g., there's absolutely no risk of overdosing if you only carry a supply/syringe at your rated dose.
When you're at a lower player level, it's lots of fun. Once you've caught most of the local pokemon it soon turns into simple grinding, however --- catching the same common pokemon to get XP, which you need more and more of to increase your level. You also get hugely shortchanged by not being in a major city. The presence of pokestops (necessary sources of in-game items) and more importantly pokemon are tied to where people aggregate. In a small city you will find a fraction of the quantity and of the variety in a big city.
Personally I don't play many games anymore because of the time commitment. Pokemon Go is actually awesome in that respect because for the most part you can only play it wondering around, no temptation to keep playing once you get home or to the office.
I have kept playing in the hopes that the gameplay would improve. But I'm pretty close to quitting myself. Hopefully they can make it enjoyable again before they hemorrhage all of their community.
Keep in mind that by sending earth microbes we're giving life there a 3.8 billion year head start. How long is it going to take to have an intelligent species? Probably somewhere between "relatively soon" and "never" with the exact timing left to some genetic rolls of the dice. What if we choose other colonization targets later on? Will we sterilize the discarded planet (presumably difficult and costly) or let it continue evolving? What if a species optimizing for intelligence turns out to be much smarter than we are and covers technological ground in exponentially faster time? Do we want to setup potential competitors directly in our own small corner of the galaxy? Or what about the threat of simple microbes? It's unlikely that if we encounter extraterrestrial microbes that they will be adapted to our bodies in a way that they can infect us, but seems to me earth microbes would stand a much better chance of evolving potentially compatible pathogens.
There may be wisdom in spearheading our colonization efforts, but I think we ought to wait on having the technology to directly monitor and manage it. Trusting that whatever evolution spits out is going to be to our direct benefit seems like an unnecessary gamble.
You aren't being denied advertising dollars. There are no advertising dollars. What people pay for is to piggy back off the sense of interest and enjoyment your media creates to sell merchandise. Your documentary highlighting the horrors of dying of trenchfoot in WWI is not going to do that, and in fact an advertisement which doesn't fit the somber mood will probably piss people off. Your video might well be an exception, but it's probably not worth Youtube's time to watch it, interpret it, and decide whether it's actually going to help them sell toilet paper. You might as well complain that other videos are getting 10 million views while yours is only getting 10. If the advertising model doesn't work for the content you're creating you can still make money off of selling it directly. Or you could sell advertisements in your videos yourself, you just won't have the benefit of youtube's analytics to determine clicks.
Journalism is almost entirely taking "snippets" from other people in the form of quotes and information and compiling them into a story, so I must assume the newspapers will also be paying out royalties on their articles to anyone they interview, mention, or quote (including when they search for comments on twitter and facebook as they like to do now).
"Intent" is difficult to demonstrate given that it lives in the minds of the accused. The website itself is based on content-agnostic algorithms. I'm sure it's true that it has a higher percentage of illicit use than google does, but that's probably true of Tor and VPN services as well. Would we be comfortable shutting those down on the same justification?
Personally, I find it hard to find any "good intent" behind hosting, e.g., The Anarchists Cookbook. But it's well-established that that doing so is protected speech. Is pointing people to IPs where they can request to receive copyrighted bits of information more insidious than pointing people to how they can make a pipebomb?
I am fine with shutting down criminally entrenched websites and prosecuting the persons involved. But the free speech protections we are promised in the US are quite broad and in almost all cases we refuse to risk weakening that simply to avoid the possibility of mischief. If Google can deliver 10% questionable content under that protection then I think someone who delivers 90% questionable content must be protected as well. I don't see how the fundamental nature of the right could change simply because we get more day-to-day value out of google.
We could enforce the law by, you know, going after the people actually breaking copyright by uploading and downloading copyrighted material.
I represent someone in that demographic from a small engineering school. Among my admittedly non-mainstream group of friends I'd guess at least half know what KDE is. I'm not sure how many actually use it vs. GNOME, but it's common for them to have a Linux or Mac laptop. Laptops have become work devices -- they're what you take to project and study groups. *nix works great for that, and easy to get everyone using the same software (within a college student's budget, no less). I'm sure other places are different, but one anecdote deserves another.
That's not a great approach for discerning medical ethics. At the point your justification for medical experiments is, "in the long term there could be (as yet undemonstrated) major benefits" I don't think there is a single experiment you could not rationalize.
This overlooks that A, B, and C are competitively selected, actively maneuvering to win, and influenced by previous results.
E.g., if B is slated to lose because C is attracting more liberal voters, B is likely to move left in order to capture those voters. Or if B2012 wasn't left enough B2016 may be someone more of that bent. Also, a disliked presidential candidate tends to depress the party's congressional holdings, which makes it more difficult to enact their agenda, and tends to setup a win for the opposing candidate in the next term.
Furthermore, in democracies votes don't merely decide outcomes, they legitimize them. If 100% of the population votes and 90% vote for Hitler because the alternative is Stalin, at that point he basically has a mandate. If only 5% of the population votes and 90% votes for Hitler, I would say an uprising is well within bounds.
Voting your conscience may not net you specific near term outcomes that you desire. But in the long run your vote is a commodity politicians value and they will shape their policies to obtain it. Unless, of course, they can obtain it some other way, such as simply by pointing out their opponent is on the left/right side. If you're going to lock in on that, then you've already spent your opinion as far as they're concerned. The only way to control politicians is to be completely willing to withhold the thing they need and value -- victory. If you let the parties blackmail *you* with outcomes, then they are the ones in control, and that will be obvious by the fact the people are only given choices (Hillary/Trump) that a sound majority of them dislike.
I am against ever taking life where it can be avoided, so I oppose the choice of action by the police unless they were resolving some imminent danger to themselves or to the public.
But "due process" was not violated. If you want the protection of the court system you have to cooperate with the system. If you skip town, you get tried in absentia. If you refuse a defense attorney, the case proceeds without one. If you shoot at the people trying to take you peacefully to court, you may not get to be taken peacefully to court.
If I may, as a person who considers themselves Christian, I would like to address your points from the perspective of my own religious understanding.
To say there is no replacement of the old testament rules to ignore vast portions, perhaps even the majority, of the new testament writings. Jesus changed marriage requirements, the punishment for adultery, reinterpreted the sabbath rules and the rules for cleanliness. After his resurrection he appears to Peter and rescinds the rules on clean and unclean, not to mention that huge recurring bit from Paul et al. about circumcision not being necessary, etc. Old testament law is a covenant between God and the Jewish people, a covenant which Christ ultimately fulfils.
Christianity is in every case a peaceful religion. Jesus never injured anyone, and whatever self-serving arguments some might come up with to justify behavior, the core of Christianity is to put your faith in Christ and become like him in every way. His life stands as an irrefutable counter-argument to any violent perversion of biblical teachings that you or I might come up with, because there is no way to do violence without violating his example.
Part of being a peaceful religion is that Christianity does not seek to overthrow governments or institutions. It instead seeks to change people by witnessing in example to them.
You do not go to hell for not believing. You go to hell for committing evil. Unholy things cannot be united with a holy God. If that sounds unpalatable, apparently Christ agreed, since he was willing to suffer and die to circumvent that on your behalf. Do all non-believers (upon death) go to hell without any secondary consideration? Some people do think that, but that's not laid out in any clear fashion. What is clear is that if you repent of evil deeds and choose Christ's path instead, you may have ever confidence of remaining in that forever.
As long we apply this to every single other political issue which exists. Because gun rights is just as validly "pro-choice" vs. "anti-choice." And school vouchers. And if cities/states choose to implement capital punishment. Etc. Or do you have a particular reason why "choice" is a word which politically is only about abortion and nothing else?
Personally, I really hate this Orwellian crap where you try to win your ideological battles by modifying the dictionary. Pro-abortion/anti-abortion clearly defines the territorial ground (and frankly gives abortion supporters the slightly more favorable "pro" adjective).
The point where you want 'pro-choice' to go alongside 'anti-abortion' because of your claims about what else your political side represents. . . that is a ridiculous self-serving waste of everyone's time. How does it sound if I say, "People who support a broad second amendment interpretation are actually ANTI-GUN because increasing legal carriers deters criminal gun use"?
Microsoft bundling IE in its capacity as the by far dominant provider of desktop operating systems was considered an anti-trust violation.
Now what about the by far most dominant social network bundling a particular political platform for its users? Is there no ethical problem with that?
I agree that FB's actions are legal and even constitutionally protected. But if you find it unnerving when companies hire lobbyists to write laws in their favor, you should probably find it even more unnerving that FB may be surreptitiously packaging the specific issues and views on which people vote.
I wonder what the monetary value to Trump/Hillary would be to suppressing news helpful to their opponent, and what sort of favorable legislation that could buy FB in return.
Why wouldn't the cars communicate? That will be important for optimizing traffic flow anyway. They could share imaging data, or time their pings to not interfere with each other. In high traffic areas it could make sense to offload all the sensing and even decision making to a roadside system.
Pretty sure in a two party system it's impossible for one of the parties be the "centrist" party.
As compelling as it might be to recast all heroes as Democrats and all villains as Republicans... I'm pretty sure the more conservative party is automatically a closer approximation for anyone born two-hundred years ago. I'm also not quite seeing the exchange of ideologies bit. If you were to interview Harriet Tubman today, on what defining Democrat issues (abortion, gay rights, gun control, universal health care, income inequality, etc.) does she sound like more like a contemporary Democrat than a contemporary Republican?
Previously, on slashdot:
The NYTimes has an 8-page exposé on how an online business is thriving because of giant amounts of negative reviews. It seems that if you directly google the company you have no problem discerning the true nature; but if you instead only google the brand names it sells, the company is at the top of the rankings. Turns out that all the negative advertisement he generates from reputable sites gives him countless links that inflate his pagerank.
I mean, there's also a reason he is revealing it was a hoax. The 'it was a hoax' articles will do damage control while also doubling his exposure. I presume they'll come up first in searches, being newer. Would this be a as great as getting your name out there in a positive light in the first place? No. But everyone else is trying to do the same thing, and it's expensive. This was effective and free. Not everyone will appreciate the joke and some potential customers will be lost. But the potential customers when no one knows about you is zero. I'd say wait and see how the company is doing in a couple of years before denying it was a good play.