You are either a troll or are willfully ignorant. I am not going to bother thinking up any more examples. The AC reply to your post is by far the best one.
With all due respect to any and all women who've ever been a victim of domestic violence, she should immediately go to the police, and stop by the store on the way home to buy a mean dog, stungun, gun, knife, pepper spray, and/or video camera. Or alternately, go to women's shelter. I have sympathy for women who haven't been taught to fend for themselves, but policy should not be dictated under the assumption that most women can be dominated by their husbands, and I am know many strong women (my girlfriend included) who would strongly object to being viewed as a lesser being incapable of defending herself against a man.
It's funny how you keep bringing up self-entitlement and me-ism, when it's so very clear that you are the one expecting the entire world to revolve around you. Just because YOU have a perfectly transparent relationship doesn't mean everyone else does, or even that most people do. I am lucky enough to be in a very intimate and transparent relationship, but I know plenty of people who aren't... in fact, I would go so far as to say that the majority of my married friends are not. And even if you were right, do you expect the librarian to just take your word that you're her wife? Just because your last names are the same? Are you going to carry around your marriage certificate in your back pocket?
No, my friend, YOU are the exception. People normally don't NEED to know what their spouse has checked out... it normally just doesn't come up in the course of most people's life, and even if it did the hassle of having to prove that they're married to the person in question really cancels out any small convenience you might have gained.
Your other example is even better. Medical confidentiality is even more vital. I work in the heath care field (indirectly) and I've seen all kinds of dispicable things, including kids who steal medications and/or money from their parents. I'm not even going to start on heath insurance and stuff...
Insofar as you're arguing that there should be a streamlined way to fill out paperwork to be appointed someone's medical representative, I wholeheartedly agree. Same goes for consent forms for library history, or any other sort of confedential information. I'm with you in the fight against inefficient, senseless bureaucracy, but having to fill out a single consent form is a very reasonable hassle. Just because you're too narrow-minded to see how this kind of information could be abused doesn't mean that it can't be abused, that it isn't abused every single day in this country.
And if you want to rant about the good old days when everyone in this country was pure and honest and had common sense... well, keep dreaming. Little has changed, except the fact that now we've got the 6 o'clock news to tell us exactly how bad it is and that, in turn, has made people more cautious. Despite what you say, this isn't a bad thing. Not in the least...
What kind of an argument is that? Because you had a somewhat irritating experience, therefore this privacy thing is too much hassle? Did you even read the examples I posted?
Making her call to see what it was did not protect or help her.
I see you completely ignored my examples. I guess I'll just have to give you some more.
You might say that your wife was not protected, but what if she (or some other wife, if these examples offend you or are otherwise not applicable) had checked out:
-a book on adultery or divorce (self-explanitory)
-a book on abortion (she doesn't want to have another kid, and would rather take care of it without you knowing)
-a book about a very serious medical condition she has just been diagnosed with. (She could have a myriad of reasons for not telling you, e.g. not wanting you to worry about it just yet because you're in the middle of some very delicate/stressful projects.)
-a book about a new hobby she's getting into (It might be a dangerous hobby and she knows you'll disapprove, or maybe she thinks you'll laugh and mock her about it, or maybe she just wants it to be a surprise when she gives you a hand-fired clay vase for Christmas)
-a book about lesbianism, or a book focused on a specific sexual fetish of some sort (if she doesn't think you'd be understanding, she damn well has the right to keep this secret from you)
-a book about a religion you do not subscribe to (if she wants to worship Shiva in private without being told by her conservative Christian husband that she's going to hell, that's her business.)
-a book on a strange or morbid subject that she checked out simply to satisfy her curiosity (she shouldn't have to explain or justify her reading habits to anyone. I know that I've checked out quite a few weird or morbid books out of mere curiosity, and I'd be pissed if someone told my family about it--even though it was merely innocent curiosity, I would now have to go through the hassle of explaining and justifying my reading habits, and there could still be some lingering doubts.)
I could go on and on. Point is, you didn't know whether your wife was being protected until after you knew the book's title. Yeah, you assumed it was a book for your 5-year-old, but since it was checked out on your wife's card you didn't know that for sure. Now, let me say that I do think that the library should offer a consent form to release your reading history, but your one small moment of irritation pales in comparison to the damage that could be done, to the lives that could be ruined if such spying was allowed. Your wife is a seperate individual, entitled to her own private life if she so chooses.
When my kid is old enough to have his own card, but still a minor, I suppose the librarians will protect his privacy be refusing to tell me what books he checks out, too.
As far as I know it doesn't apply to kids (few civil liberties do, it seems.) I seem to recall my mom calling up and doing some checking on my reading habits a few times. If it does in fact apply to kids (and my mom was just bluffing or our librarian just didn't care), that's another issue entirely--I'm talking about consenting adults who want to read in privacy. Don't you dare drag that despicable "it's for the children!" argument when it clearly does not apply to the issue at hand.
It's gone too far. Where did the common sense go? I think it left when the sense of entitlement and privacy arrived as a consequence of the warped ideology of the boomers.
Yup. You had to wait a few minutes while your wife called to ask about the book. The horror!
If anyone is warped, it's people like you who would rather we sacrifice every last one of our rights (which incidentally have existed for hundreds of years before the boomers) in the name of a small, and I mean VERY fucking small convenience. And to top it off, you actually call it "common sense." Natch.
You're so far detached from reality I will not be surprised at all if your reply consists of nothing but Biblical quotes which "prove" that God hates privacy.
and before anyone points out, yes I made a bunch of really dumbass spelling/grammar/word mistakes. This sort of thing happens at 3:30 AM when one has run out of Mountain Dew.
The freedom to read what you want to read is a powerful freedom indeed. If the police can walk up to the library and get a list of books you've checked out, they might discover all kinds of dirty (but perfectly) legal facts about you--e.g. that you're gay or at the very least gay-sympathetic. They can then use this information against you, officially or unofficially, in the social or political arena. Having to think twice every time you check out a book is a very big lost of freedom indeed--it's a potential curtailment of knowledge.
Privacy in general IS a rather huge freedom, and I really wish the constitution framers had made it explicit. A little-realized fact is that they were against the Bill of Rights in the beginning--not because they were against the rights it protected, but because they did not want to give the impression that it guaranteed ONLY those rights and no others. Unfortunately, that is the impression most Americans have today. Sophisticated and all-encompassing recordkeeping and surveillence didn't exist in the 1700s; the right to privacy was really rather a given. If they had realized the comming law enforcement revolutions, I'm sure they would have made it explict. As it is, the right to privacy must be protected under the "all other rights are reserved by the people, or by the states" clause. The courts and legislatures haven't been perfect about protecting this right, but the Patriot Act notwithstanding, it's still there at least a little bit.
It is very much in the spirit of the constitution to protect privacy. The police have no business gathering ANY of my private information whatsoever until they have obtained a warrant. Sheep like you always seem to forget that part--no one's arguing that they don't have a right to the library records. By all means, if they need it they should get it!...but first, they must get a warrant, and to do that they must show that they have reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.
Asshats like you are saying that they should have the power to search my private information even without reasonable suspicion. Please justify that to me. Please tell me why I should have to explain myself when a police officer comes to my door, asking why I checked out Mein Kampf or The Anarchist's Cookbook. Unless he suspects me of a crime, it's none of his fucking business what I read or why. Yet, he could very easily use such information against me if he wanted to make my life difficult. POLICE SHOULD NOT HAVE SUCH POWER OVER LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS. You want to check up on my internet surfing habits, my reading habits, my phone calls, my porn collection, etc.? Fine, be my guess! You just have to have a good REASON first. It doesn't have to be ironclad; to get a warrant you just need a bit of a motive and/or a bit of circumstancial evidence. What you're asking for is the ability for LEAs to go fishing, trolling for petty criminals with absolutely no reasonable suspicion--but realize, they'll only do this amongst people they didn't like to begin with--the niggers, the spics, the liberals, etc. And like I said, even when they don't find evidence of wrongdoing they can still often wind up with damaging information.
I'm a law-abiding citizen, but I know I've checked out several books that, if commonly known (and correlated with certain facts reguarding my public life), might give me problems if I ever chose to run for office. What if I was an opponent of the local sheriff? Well, if this kind of shit were legal it would be a pretty simple matter for him to get my library records and let it slip to the local newspaper via an "anonymous source"...
So, there's your explanation, oh Anonymous Coward who claims to not see the usefulness of anonymity. It's given you the ability to attack me without losing karma or being added to anyone's foe list, hasn't it? Freedom to gain and share information is extremely sacred indeed, and if I may say so you are extremely anti-American (I'm going to continue to use the word American like it still stands for freedom. Who knows, maybe it will again... one day) for trying to deny that freedom.
I'm not sure it actually is the best argument she could make, because it almost lends weight to the retards like b0nj0m0n (see his -1 Troll post below) who say that the law should be changed to allow police to do this. IMO, the best argument she could've made was "If the police had just cause for this information, they could have gotten a warrant for it. They did not have a warrant, so I was inclined to believe that they did not have just cause, at least not yet. In this country we have a long-standing precident that people are innocent until proven guilty and a long-standing precident of seperation of powers, including judicial oversight of law enforcement. Anyone who believes that I should have violated my patron's civil rights just because the police said I should needs to either grow some fucking balls and realize this is America, where freedom comes above absolute safety, or move to a "safer" totalitarian country like China, where I hear their police have all kinds of powers that ours lack."
It never ceases to amaze me that the most diehard, ardent flag-wavers are usually the least American people of all... those who use the word "freedom" the most frequently seem to have no fucking clue what it actually means.
But the process of calculation is equivalent to the process of running them, so in a sense you don't know what's going to happen until it actually does.
Then I'm not truly omniscient, whereas the Christian god supposedly is. I would further argue that omnipotence cannot truly exist without omniscience. What is absolute power without the ability to foresee the consequences of your actions? You could even inadvertently bring about your own downfall and lose your power (e.g. the AI becomes so intelligent it starts to spread and declare war on humanity a la Skynet.) Power is focused ability, not accidental or incompetent ability. If God didn't know what was going to happen, then he couldn't have made any predictions at all. Satan might repent tomorrow, the antiChrist might grow up to be a hippie, and one of the three wise men might have decided to slit baby Jesus's little throat.
I'm not sure why you say that. In the Bible there are plenty of examples of inaction being considered sin.
Your specific examples aside, I'm talking about the overall themes of and the most popular applications of Christian morality, not necessarily specific interpretations of certain Old Testiment stories (you can 'prove' just about any point you want by quoting select Old Testiment passages.)
I'm not saying that passive morality doesn't exist, it's just that it's 1000x weaker than active morality. The vast majority of Christians would much rather fight evil than try to do good. To understand this, just look at some mortality figures. 850,000+ Americans die each year from stroke and heart attack, 550,000+ from cancer, 100,000+ from smoking-related respiratory diseases (not including lung cancer, stroke, or heart attack), 70,000+ from diabetes, 60,000+ from pneumonia, and 60,000+ from car accidents. There are a few extremely simple ways we could reduce these numbers drastically, yet they are not taken because there is no clear cut bad guy to fight. People don't have a problem with "Thou shalt not kill"--we spend billions on law enforcement (around 10,000 American deaths a year from murder) and well over a trillion on fighting terrorism (2,500 deaths in ONE year. A couple hundred deaths more from all other years combined.) But "Preserve life"--that's a concept that flies right over the head of most Christians. We spend many orders of magnitude less on problems that kill and maim and cause misery to hundreds of thousands of people each year. We "pass the buck", we shirk responsibility, we shy away from taking drastic action if there's any chance at all that the action could in any way negatively affect someone whom we perceive as being 'innocent' (when in reality even the most horrific 'bad guys' are at least in some way created by their environment.) Great monoliths of evil and human suffering are built by groups of individuals, each of which has committed only a tiny portion of evil, and so we let it slide and we do not condemn anyone for their apathy except in the most extreme of circumstances.
Compare that to a system of morality where allowing someone to die (when you have the ability to stop it--clearly, one cannot be everywhere at once) is equivalent to killing them yourself. There's something to be said for freedom, obviously (including the freedom to fuck up your own health) but that's not to say that we couldn't come up with some pretty drastic solutions while still preserving individual freedoms. If nothing else, we could spend over a trillion dollars on medical research instead of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Homeland Security. But... we could also force the tobacco industry to adopt better cigarette filters, prosecute parents for child endangerment if they continually feed their obese kids extremely unhealthy foods (I work with the mentally handicapped, and I've seen several horrific examples of this including a mother who was furious that her EXTREMELY fat daughter was losing weight because we were--gasp!--feeding her proper portions of healthy food. She
Either a good percentage of humanity is crazy, or believing in an invisible man in the sky is not as crazy as you'd first believe.
Considering that very few people who believe in the invisible man in the sky can actually agree on some basic facts about him (even those of the same denomination can have radically different beliefs about the nature, power, disposition, and rules of God) I'd say that the "he doesn't exist" opinion has more support. Even if you disagree with this line of reasoning, majority means nothing. At one point in time the majority of humanity believed all kinds of blatantly false things (geocentric universe.) People STILL believe the stupidest things, like being cold will give you a cold (I'm in Florida, and I get sick most often in the summer. I guess that must means that down here, being hot makes you get colds! Or maybe it could just be that being indoors--often to escape the brutal heat/cold depending on the season and where you live--puts you in close proximity to other people and thus increases your chances of getting sick. Naaaaaaaaaaaaah, couldn't be, popular "wisdom" must be right!)
does this mean that you do not recognize any action as morally wrong?
Objectively morally wrong? No, there is no such thing as objective morality. Subjectively, I have my own personal morality, but 'sin' is a strictly religious concept with connotations that I absolutely do not recognize. In particular:
1. Original sin is bullshit. I am not responsible for the crimes of my ancestors.
2. Sin places little or no emphasis on immortal inactions. See the Isaac Asimov short story Little Lost Robot for details as to why this is an extremely bad thing.
3. Most Christians hold that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and created everything in existence. If this is true, then every sin ever committed is a direct foreseeable result of his actions, because he knew exactly what was going to happen with the fruit and the snake before he even bothered breathing life into Adam. At that moment he even knew that I'd be sitting here now denying Jesus and blaspheming his name--he knew that billions of years in the future (oh sorry--"5000 years") my mind would refuse to accept Christianity; my "faith" wasn't strong enough. Yet, he created me. He holds the entire history of time omnisciently and deterministically in his mind. Therefore, I don't see how any of this can possibly be my fault. Don't give me "that's the great mystery!" horseshit. Free will and absolute power/absolute knowledge(determinism) by the sole creator of the everything universe are simply not compatible. At best my will is just an extension of his.
I respect the fact (as I did in my original post) that the CSM has a very good reputation. I haven't ever read it myself, but I will probably check it out one of these days (no, not now, I'm too damn sleepy. Ranting on/., however, is always a great way to keep awake) and as I read it I will try to keep an open mind. I merely think it is highly foolish to say that a newspaper (which DOES contain daily religious content) owned by a freakin' Christian church has absolutely no religious slant. From what I hear it sounds like they've done a great job keeping their biases under control. That's great; go them. For the record, here are their *potential* biases that I object to and my reasons for objecting to them:
1. As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life.
Truth is not gained through faith; faith is the antithesis of truth. The Word of the Bible was decided upon by a commitee of very failible humans. Life by definition must not be eternal.
2. We acknowledge and adore one supreme and infinite God. We acknowledge His Son, one Christ; the Holy Ghost or divine Comforter; and man in God's image and likeness.
None of these things exist. If the God of the Old Testiment (the demiurge, whom really does seem to be a different character entirely from the God of the New Testiment) did truly exist, I would coinsciously choose not to worship him; I would rather spit on his name and burn forever in Hell than worship such a petty, hateful, jealous god, and I doubt the sanity of anyone who can perfectly reconcile the pitifully shallow, weak and evil God of the Old Testiment with Jesus's 'loving father'.
3. We acknowledge God's forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal. But the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts.
The only sin I recognize is opposite over hypotenuse.
4. We acknowledge Jesus' atonement as the evidence of divine, efficacious Love, unfolding man's unity with God through Christ Jesus the Way-shower; and we acknowledge that man is saved through Christ, through Truth, Life, and Love as demonstrated by the Galilean Prophet in healing the sick, and overcoming sin and death.
Pure nonsense.
5. We acknowledge that the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection served to uplift faith to understand eternal Life, even the allness of Soul, Spirit, and the nothingness of matter.
If the surviving followers of David Koresh said he was resurrected (but no one else saw him before he disappeared again), would you believe them? Christianity, like all religions, was originally a cult, and its scriptures were written by fantatical cultists. Divine authority begs the question--who says the Bible is divinely inspired? Why the Bible does, of course.
6. And we solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure.
Drivel. Very noble drivel, but drivel nonetheless.
7. Not a strict requirement, but many Christian Scientists believe that prayer is an acceptable substitute for medicine. I'm all for treating the mind as well as the body, for taking into account the placebo effect and trying to encourage joy and optimism, but outright substitution and denial of proven, conventional treatment is seriously fucked up, especially when you pass on such bullshit to your kids (one of my best friends from Jr. High was a Christian Scientist and he never took any medicine no matter how sick he got.) This is a rather major bias, IMO. Can anyone comment on the CSM's coverage of the medical field?
So now, to be fair, here is my bias:
1. I really don't think I'll ever fully trust anyone who professes to believe any of the above seven points... and the owers of the C
It's nearly seven fucking o'clock and I haven't slept yet. Writing a fucking bibliography to support my casual observations is/was not on the top of my priorty list (staying awake until my shift ends is.) I didn't damn CSM (I even notice that I also "heard" that they produce some pretty decent stuff), and as it turns out my secondhand information was correct.
That said, what you said Re: Wikipedia is pretty much right, but I'm too fucking tired to care.
You're probably still not getting the dedicated religious content => religious slant angle, so let me elaborate.
I'm going to go out on the limb here and say that the vast majority of religious articles in the CSM and other periodicals with a religious section has to do with the three major Abrahamic religions. To be blunt, the sacred texts of these religions are fairy tales and the vast majority of their adherents take them way too seriously, to their own intellectual detriment and to the detriment of happiness of those around them who do not share their own narrow view of the universe. Not to marginalize the good that has been done in the name of religion--there's absolutely nothing wrong with putting "good" up on a pedistal and praising good deeds when done in the name of religion. However, to put (again, mostly Abrahamic) religion up on a pedistal as a recognized and unquestionable aspect/catagory of newsworthy life lowers that newspaper's level of rationality and openmindedness, at least in my eyes. Even if they do it just to pander to their readers, this means that they are that much less likely to treat religious matters with an open mind for fear of offending said readers. On average, how many articles critical of religion are found in the religious section of the CSM (or any other newspaper with a religious section)? How many times do they say in interviews "yes, but isn't your war on love just a little counter-productive?" or "yes, but wouldn't the secular humanist way of doing things be a little better in this circumstance?" I don't read any religious section, so I couldn't say, but I would hazzard a guess that religious points of view are almost never questioned in any fashion. Compare that to an article in the main section or business section or whatever--those issues typically do get at least a modicum of objectivity.
None of the newspapers and news magazines I read (even the mainstream ones--Florida Today, our local county paper, etc.) have religious sections, nor do they go out of their way to publish religious material on a daily basis. Perhaps some (many?) other periodicals do this, and if so I would submit to you that they also have at least a bit of a religious slant.
If you think that Wikipedia can confirm anything, you're a fool and don't understand the reliability of that enterprise nor the purpose of encyclopedias.
And you're a fool if you think that a paper encyclopedia is more reliable. Wikipedia has serious problems, I grant you (they really need a slashdot-style moderation system--this "everyone has equal power over each other" system is BS.), but at least the errors and biases that crop up are usually (eventually) addressed. Wikipedia is better at keeping up to date, too.
I have heard (and wikipedia confirms) that at the request of the founder, there is always at least one religious article per issue. I cannot comment on the quality of their general articles (though I've heard they've done some good stuff) or the quality/tone of their mandated daily religious article, but you can't really say that they have "no religious slant" if they are, in fact, going out of their way to run at least one religious article per issue.
I don't know... even Dubya's stupidty would have to be running at unusually high levels if he (or someone like him... oh dear god PLEASE not Jeb Bush/'08) ordered a nuclear attack against ANY nation that had not attacked the USA with nukes. North Korea is not stupid to do such a thing (vs. South Korea *maybe*, but even then the USA would be shooting itself in both feet if it nuked North Korea in response.) Iran... now that's another story.
Fusion bombs can be clean. The great misconception is that they are always clean, or even that they are desired to be clean by the military. Take a fusion bomb and wrap it with Uranium-238--under these conditions, this so-called "depleted" Uranium suddenly becomes very fissile indeed, and the resulting explosion will be many times bigger. As an added bonus, extremely intense neutron radiation is produced, enough to instantly kill anyone lucky enough to survive the blast (even those in fallout shelters, unless their shelters have many feet of lead shielding or buried very deeply underground) and generate amounts of fallout.
But it gets better. Instead of U-238, you can surround the fusion stage with "salt", a non-radioactive isotope that is transmuted into a highly radioactive isotope from the resulting neutron bombardment. The most infamous candidate is Cobalt-59. In a fission-fusion-fission bomb with the last "fission" stage omitted and a Cobalt-59 jacket substituted, the neutron flux will turn most of it into Cobalt-60 and the blast will scatter it across the land. Cobalt-60 is very unique, in that it puts out enough gamma rays to be very lethal (as in you *will* die if exposed to it for longer than a month or so. Not die as in die of cancer 20 years from now--you'll succumb to radiation poisoning), yet it has a relatively long half-life--around five years.
In another thread someone joked that nuclear weapons were passe--that we should be moving on to antimatter or something. Trust me, nuclear is quite scary enough. Depending on the wind conditions, a single bomb could quite literally destroy all life on the east coast of the USA. Make no mistake about it, if we really wanted to we could build enough Cobalt bombs to destroy all life on the planet. We take comfort in the fact that we're not crazy enough to do something like that, but I am not entirely convinced that Iran is similarly sane. MAD (Mutually Assured Distruction) worked against the relatively rational, aetheistic Soviets... but now we're up against cultures and ideologies that glorify martyrdom and kamikaze attacks to a ridiculous degree. I'm really not sure what's going to happen, but I feel most people in this country have become far to complacent, far too comfortable with the idea of nuclear weapons that everyone has but no one uses.
Let me hasten to say that on the other end of the spectrum are the retards who become hysterical every time the word "radiation" or "nuclear" is mentioned (fun fact--a single coal power plant pumps more radioactive particles into our atmosphere and water supply in a year than the three mile island accident), but we shouldn't forget that in the wrong hands, these weapons have very real potential as doomsday devices.
Nitrogen isn't completely inert (as others have noted.) Wikipedia confirms my somewhat-hazy memory--titanium does indeed burn in a pure nitrogen atmosphere. I'm not sure about argon vs. nitrogen, but as the earth's atmosphere is 70% nitrogen and 1% argon, I'm not really sure that's an issue.
Titanium is much heavier than Aluminium, so I don't see titanium soda cans or anything on the horizon (bikes, probably. Planes... maybe partially.) However, in many cases it's a very strong contender for replacing steel. Unless the metal is going to be getting extremely hot (IIRC, at over 800 degrees C titanium will burn in a nitrogen atmosphere) or you need it to be magnetic, titanium offers 40% less weight and 30% increased strength over steel.
It's win/win. A titanium car will get better gas milage due to weight reduction, yet would fare better in an accident than a similarly-sized steel car. A titanium construction beam will support more than a steel beam while putting less stress on the supports below it.
Yes. If you fail to read the contracts you agree to, you may very well have your first-born taken away from you.
Nope. Human trafficing is illegal. You see, the government can and does put limits on what you can sign away. You cannot sign away your right to resell an OEM copy of windows, for example--even though Microsoft claims this is against contract and cowardly (or shrewd, I suppose) corps like eBay try to enforce the ban, it has absolutely no legal weight because of the First-Sale Doctrine (US Copyright Act, section 109.)
It *is* just a piece of text. Just because something is written in there doesn't make it legal or enforceable.
Slashdot Mirror
You are either a troll or are willfully ignorant. I am not going to bother thinking up any more examples. The AC reply to your post is by far the best one.
With all due respect to any and all women who've ever been a victim of domestic violence, she should immediately go to the police, and stop by the store on the way home to buy a mean dog, stungun, gun, knife, pepper spray, and/or video camera. Or alternately, go to women's shelter. I have sympathy for women who haven't been taught to fend for themselves, but policy should not be dictated under the assumption that most women can be dominated by their husbands, and I am know many strong women (my girlfriend included) who would strongly object to being viewed as a lesser being incapable of defending herself against a man.
It's funny how you keep bringing up self-entitlement and me-ism, when it's so very clear that you are the one expecting the entire world to revolve around you. Just because YOU have a perfectly transparent relationship doesn't mean everyone else does, or even that most people do. I am lucky enough to be in a very intimate and transparent relationship, but I know plenty of people who aren't... in fact, I would go so far as to say that the majority of my married friends are not. And even if you were right, do you expect the librarian to just take your word that you're her wife? Just because your last names are the same? Are you going to carry around your marriage certificate in your back pocket?
No, my friend, YOU are the exception. People normally don't NEED to know what their spouse has checked out... it normally just doesn't come up in the course of most people's life, and even if it did the hassle of having to prove that they're married to the person in question really cancels out any small convenience you might have gained.
Your other example is even better. Medical confidentiality is even more vital. I work in the heath care field (indirectly) and I've seen all kinds of dispicable things, including kids who steal medications and/or money from their parents. I'm not even going to start on heath insurance and stuff...
Insofar as you're arguing that there should be a streamlined way to fill out paperwork to be appointed someone's medical representative, I wholeheartedly agree. Same goes for consent forms for library history, or any other sort of confedential information. I'm with you in the fight against inefficient, senseless bureaucracy, but having to fill out a single consent form is a very reasonable hassle. Just because you're too narrow-minded to see how this kind of information could be abused doesn't mean that it can't be abused, that it isn't abused every single day in this country.
And if you want to rant about the good old days when everyone in this country was pure and honest and had common sense... well, keep dreaming. Little has changed, except the fact that now we've got the 6 o'clock news to tell us exactly how bad it is and that, in turn, has made people more cautious. Despite what you say, this isn't a bad thing. Not in the least...
What kind of an argument is that? Because you had a somewhat irritating experience, therefore this privacy thing is too much hassle? Did you even read the examples I posted?
Making her call to see what it was did not protect or help her.
I see you completely ignored my examples. I guess I'll just have to give you some more.
You might say that your wife was not protected, but what if she (or some other wife, if these examples offend you or are otherwise not applicable) had checked out:
-a book on adultery or divorce (self-explanitory)
-a book on abortion (she doesn't want to have another kid, and would rather take care of it without you knowing)
-a book about a very serious medical condition she has just been diagnosed with. (She could have a myriad of reasons for not telling you, e.g. not wanting you to worry about it just yet because you're in the middle of some very delicate/stressful projects.)
-a book about a new hobby she's getting into (It might be a dangerous hobby and she knows you'll disapprove, or maybe she thinks you'll laugh and mock her about it, or maybe she just wants it to be a surprise when she gives you a hand-fired clay vase for Christmas)
-a book about lesbianism, or a book focused on a specific sexual fetish of some sort (if she doesn't think you'd be understanding, she damn well has the right to keep this secret from you)
-a book about a religion you do not subscribe to (if she wants to worship Shiva in private without being told by her conservative Christian husband that she's going to hell, that's her business.)
-a book on a strange or morbid subject that she checked out simply to satisfy her curiosity (she shouldn't have to explain or justify her reading habits to anyone. I know that I've checked out quite a few weird or morbid books out of mere curiosity, and I'd be pissed if someone told my family about it--even though it was merely innocent curiosity, I would now have to go through the hassle of explaining and justifying my reading habits, and there could still be some lingering doubts.)
I could go on and on. Point is, you didn't know whether your wife was being protected until after you knew the book's title. Yeah, you assumed it was a book for your 5-year-old, but since it was checked out on your wife's card you didn't know that for sure. Now, let me say that I do think that the library should offer a consent form to release your reading history, but your one small moment of irritation pales in comparison to the damage that could be done, to the lives that could be ruined if such spying was allowed. Your wife is a seperate individual, entitled to her own private life if she so chooses.
When my kid is old enough to have his own card, but still a minor, I suppose the librarians will protect his privacy be refusing to tell me what books he checks out, too.
As far as I know it doesn't apply to kids (few civil liberties do, it seems.) I seem to recall my mom calling up and doing some checking on my reading habits a few times. If it does in fact apply to kids (and my mom was just bluffing or our librarian just didn't care), that's another issue entirely--I'm talking about consenting adults who want to read in privacy. Don't you dare drag that despicable "it's for the children!" argument when it clearly does not apply to the issue at hand.
It's gone too far. Where did the common sense go? I think it left when the sense of entitlement and privacy arrived as a consequence of the warped ideology of the boomers.
Yup. You had to wait a few minutes while your wife called to ask about the book. The horror!
If anyone is warped, it's people like you who would rather we sacrifice every last one of our rights (which incidentally have existed for hundreds of years before the boomers) in the name of a small, and I mean VERY fucking small convenience. And to top it off, you actually call it "common sense." Natch.
You're so far detached from reality I will not be surprised at all if your reply consists of nothing but Biblical quotes which "prove" that God hates privacy.
and before anyone points out, yes I made a bunch of really dumbass spelling/grammar/word mistakes. This sort of thing happens at 3:30 AM when one has run out of Mountain Dew.
The freedom to read what you want to read is a powerful freedom indeed. If the police can walk up to the library and get a list of books you've checked out, they might discover all kinds of dirty (but perfectly) legal facts about you--e.g. that you're gay or at the very least gay-sympathetic. They can then use this information against you, officially or unofficially, in the social or political arena. Having to think twice every time you check out a book is a very big lost of freedom indeed--it's a potential curtailment of knowledge.
...but first, they must get a warrant, and to do that they must show that they have reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.
Privacy in general IS a rather huge freedom, and I really wish the constitution framers had made it explicit. A little-realized fact is that they were against the Bill of Rights in the beginning--not because they were against the rights it protected, but because they did not want to give the impression that it guaranteed ONLY those rights and no others. Unfortunately, that is the impression most Americans have today. Sophisticated and all-encompassing recordkeeping and surveillence didn't exist in the 1700s; the right to privacy was really rather a given. If they had realized the comming law enforcement revolutions, I'm sure they would have made it explict. As it is, the right to privacy must be protected under the "all other rights are reserved by the people, or by the states" clause. The courts and legislatures haven't been perfect about protecting this right, but the Patriot Act notwithstanding, it's still there at least a little bit.
It is very much in the spirit of the constitution to protect privacy. The police have no business gathering ANY of my private information whatsoever until they have obtained a warrant. Sheep like you always seem to forget that part--no one's arguing that they don't have a right to the library records. By all means, if they need it they should get it!
Asshats like you are saying that they should have the power to search my private information even without reasonable suspicion. Please justify that to me. Please tell me why I should have to explain myself when a police officer comes to my door, asking why I checked out Mein Kampf or The Anarchist's Cookbook. Unless he suspects me of a crime, it's none of his fucking business what I read or why. Yet, he could very easily use such information against me if he wanted to make my life difficult. POLICE SHOULD NOT HAVE SUCH POWER OVER LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS. You want to check up on my internet surfing habits, my reading habits, my phone calls, my porn collection, etc.? Fine, be my guess! You just have to have a good REASON first. It doesn't have to be ironclad; to get a warrant you just need a bit of a motive and/or a bit of circumstancial evidence. What you're asking for is the ability for LEAs to go fishing, trolling for petty criminals with absolutely no reasonable suspicion--but realize, they'll only do this amongst people they didn't like to begin with--the niggers, the spics, the liberals, etc. And like I said, even when they don't find evidence of wrongdoing they can still often wind up with damaging information.
I'm a law-abiding citizen, but I know I've checked out several books that, if commonly known (and correlated with certain facts reguarding my public life), might give me problems if I ever chose to run for office. What if I was an opponent of the local sheriff? Well, if this kind of shit were legal it would be a pretty simple matter for him to get my library records and let it slip to the local newspaper via an "anonymous source"...
So, there's your explanation, oh Anonymous Coward who claims to not see the usefulness of anonymity. It's given you the ability to attack me without losing karma or being added to anyone's foe list, hasn't it? Freedom to gain and share information is extremely sacred indeed, and if I may say so you are extremely anti-American (I'm going to continue to use the word American like it still stands for freedom. Who knows, maybe it will again... one day) for trying to deny that freedom.
I'm not sure it actually is the best argument she could make, because it almost lends weight to the retards like b0nj0m0n (see his -1 Troll post below) who say that the law should be changed to allow police to do this. IMO, the best argument she could've made was "If the police had just cause for this information, they could have gotten a warrant for it. They did not have a warrant, so I was inclined to believe that they did not have just cause, at least not yet. In this country we have a long-standing precident that people are innocent until proven guilty and a long-standing precident of seperation of powers, including judicial oversight of law enforcement. Anyone who believes that I should have violated my patron's civil rights just because the police said I should needs to either grow some fucking balls and realize this is America, where freedom comes above absolute safety, or move to a "safer" totalitarian country like China, where I hear their police have all kinds of powers that ours lack."
It never ceases to amaze me that the most diehard, ardent flag-wavers are usually the least American people of all... those who use the word "freedom" the most frequently seem to have no fucking clue what it actually means.
But the process of calculation is equivalent to the process of running them, so in a sense you don't know what's going to happen until it actually does.
Then I'm not truly omniscient, whereas the Christian god supposedly is. I would further argue that omnipotence cannot truly exist without omniscience. What is absolute power without the ability to foresee the consequences of your actions? You could even inadvertently bring about your own downfall and lose your power (e.g. the AI becomes so intelligent it starts to spread and declare war on humanity a la Skynet.) Power is focused ability, not accidental or incompetent ability. If God didn't know what was going to happen, then he couldn't have made any predictions at all. Satan might repent tomorrow, the antiChrist might grow up to be a hippie, and one of the three wise men might have decided to slit baby Jesus's little throat.
I'm not sure why you say that. In the Bible there are plenty of examples of inaction being considered sin.
Your specific examples aside, I'm talking about the overall themes of and the most popular applications of Christian morality, not necessarily specific interpretations of certain Old Testiment stories (you can 'prove' just about any point you want by quoting select Old Testiment passages.)
I'm not saying that passive morality doesn't exist, it's just that it's 1000x weaker than active morality. The vast majority of Christians would much rather fight evil than try to do good. To understand this, just look at some mortality figures. 850,000+ Americans die each year from stroke and heart attack, 550,000+ from cancer, 100,000+ from smoking-related respiratory diseases (not including lung cancer, stroke, or heart attack), 70,000+ from diabetes, 60,000+ from pneumonia, and 60,000+ from car accidents. There are a few extremely simple ways we could reduce these numbers drastically, yet they are not taken because there is no clear cut bad guy to fight. People don't have a problem with "Thou shalt not kill"--we spend billions on law enforcement (around 10,000 American deaths a year from murder) and well over a trillion on fighting terrorism (2,500 deaths in ONE year. A couple hundred deaths more from all other years combined.) But "Preserve life"--that's a concept that flies right over the head of most Christians. We spend many orders of magnitude less on problems that kill and maim and cause misery to hundreds of thousands of people each year. We "pass the buck", we shirk responsibility, we shy away from taking drastic action if there's any chance at all that the action could in any way negatively affect someone whom we perceive as being 'innocent' (when in reality even the most horrific 'bad guys' are at least in some way created by their environment.) Great monoliths of evil and human suffering are built by groups of individuals, each of which has committed only a tiny portion of evil, and so we let it slide and we do not condemn anyone for their apathy except in the most extreme of circumstances.
Compare that to a system of morality where allowing someone to die (when you have the ability to stop it--clearly, one cannot be everywhere at once) is equivalent to killing them yourself. There's something to be said for freedom, obviously (including the freedom to fuck up your own health) but that's not to say that we couldn't come up with some pretty drastic solutions while still preserving individual freedoms. If nothing else, we could spend over a trillion dollars on medical research instead of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Homeland Security. But... we could also force the tobacco industry to adopt better cigarette filters, prosecute parents for child endangerment if they continually feed their obese kids extremely unhealthy foods (I work with the mentally handicapped, and I've seen several horrific examples of this including a mother who was furious that her EXTREMELY fat daughter was losing weight because we were--gasp!--feeding her proper portions of healthy food. She
Either a good percentage of humanity is crazy, or believing in an invisible man in the sky is not as crazy as you'd first believe.
Considering that very few people who believe in the invisible man in the sky can actually agree on some basic facts about him (even those of the same denomination can have radically different beliefs about the nature, power, disposition, and rules of God) I'd say that the "he doesn't exist" opinion has more support. Even if you disagree with this line of reasoning, majority means nothing. At one point in time the majority of humanity believed all kinds of blatantly false things (geocentric universe.) People STILL believe the stupidest things, like being cold will give you a cold (I'm in Florida, and I get sick most often in the summer. I guess that must means that down here, being hot makes you get colds! Or maybe it could just be that being indoors--often to escape the brutal heat/cold depending on the season and where you live--puts you in close proximity to other people and thus increases your chances of getting sick. Naaaaaaaaaaaaah, couldn't be, popular "wisdom" must be right!)
does this mean that you do not recognize any action as morally wrong?
Objectively morally wrong? No, there is no such thing as objective morality. Subjectively, I have my own personal morality, but 'sin' is a strictly religious concept with connotations that I absolutely do not recognize. In particular:
1. Original sin is bullshit. I am not responsible for the crimes of my ancestors.
2. Sin places little or no emphasis on immortal inactions. See the Isaac Asimov short story Little Lost Robot for details as to why this is an extremely bad thing.
3. Most Christians hold that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and created everything in existence. If this is true, then every sin ever committed is a direct foreseeable result of his actions, because he knew exactly what was going to happen with the fruit and the snake before he even bothered breathing life into Adam. At that moment he even knew that I'd be sitting here now denying Jesus and blaspheming his name--he knew that billions of years in the future (oh sorry--"5000 years") my mind would refuse to accept Christianity; my "faith" wasn't strong enough. Yet, he created me. He holds the entire history of time omnisciently and deterministically in his mind. Therefore, I don't see how any of this can possibly be my fault. Don't give me "that's the great mystery!" horseshit. Free will and absolute power/absolute knowledge(determinism) by the sole creator of the everything universe are simply not compatible. At best my will is just an extension of his.
I respect the fact (as I did in my original post) that the CSM has a very good reputation. I haven't ever read it myself, but I will probably check it out one of these days (no, not now, I'm too damn sleepy. Ranting on /., however, is always a great way to keep awake) and as I read it I will try to keep an open mind. I merely think it is highly foolish to say that a newspaper (which DOES contain daily religious content) owned by a freakin' Christian church has absolutely no religious slant. From what I hear it sounds like they've done a great job keeping their biases under control. That's great; go them. For the record, here are their *potential* biases that I object to and my reasons for objecting to them:
1. As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life.
Truth is not gained through faith; faith is the antithesis of truth. The Word of the Bible was decided upon by a commitee of very failible humans. Life by definition must not be eternal.
2. We acknowledge and adore one supreme and infinite God. We acknowledge His Son, one Christ; the Holy Ghost or divine Comforter; and man in God's image and likeness.
None of these things exist. If the God of the Old Testiment (the demiurge, whom really does seem to be a different character entirely from the God of the New Testiment) did truly exist, I would coinsciously choose not to worship him; I would rather spit on his name and burn forever in Hell than worship such a petty, hateful, jealous god, and I doubt the sanity of anyone who can perfectly reconcile the pitifully shallow, weak and evil God of the Old Testiment with Jesus's 'loving father'.
3. We acknowledge God's forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal. But the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts.
The only sin I recognize is opposite over hypotenuse.
4. We acknowledge Jesus' atonement as the evidence of divine, efficacious Love, unfolding man's unity with God through Christ Jesus the Way-shower; and we acknowledge that man is saved through Christ, through Truth, Life, and Love as demonstrated by the Galilean Prophet in healing the sick, and overcoming sin and death.
Pure nonsense.
5. We acknowledge that the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection served to uplift faith to understand eternal Life, even the allness of Soul, Spirit, and the nothingness of matter.
If the surviving followers of David Koresh said he was resurrected (but no one else saw him before he disappeared again), would you believe them? Christianity, like all religions, was originally a cult, and its scriptures were written by fantatical cultists. Divine authority begs the question--who says the Bible is divinely inspired? Why the Bible does, of course.
6. And we solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure.
Drivel. Very noble drivel, but drivel nonetheless.
7. Not a strict requirement, but many Christian Scientists believe that prayer is an acceptable substitute for medicine. I'm all for treating the mind as well as the body, for taking into account the placebo effect and trying to encourage joy and optimism, but outright substitution and denial of proven, conventional treatment is seriously fucked up, especially when you pass on such bullshit to your kids (one of my best friends from Jr. High was a Christian Scientist and he never took any medicine no matter how sick he got.) This is a rather major bias, IMO. Can anyone comment on the CSM's coverage of the medical field?
So now, to be fair, here is my bias:
1. I really don't think I'll ever fully trust anyone who professes to believe any of the above seven points... and the owers of the C
It's nearly seven fucking o'clock and I haven't slept yet. Writing a fucking bibliography to support my casual observations is/was not on the top of my priorty list (staying awake until my shift ends is.) I didn't damn CSM (I even notice that I also "heard" that they produce some pretty decent stuff), and as it turns out my secondhand information was correct.
That said, what you said Re: Wikipedia is pretty much right, but I'm too fucking tired to care.
You're probably still not getting the dedicated religious content => religious slant angle, so let me elaborate.
I'm going to go out on the limb here and say that the vast majority of religious articles in the CSM and other periodicals with a religious section has to do with the three major Abrahamic religions. To be blunt, the sacred texts of these religions are fairy tales and the vast majority of their adherents take them way too seriously, to their own intellectual detriment and to the detriment of happiness of those around them who do not share their own narrow view of the universe. Not to marginalize the good that has been done in the name of religion--there's absolutely nothing wrong with putting "good" up on a pedistal and praising good deeds when done in the name of religion. However, to put (again, mostly Abrahamic) religion up on a pedistal as a recognized and unquestionable aspect/catagory of newsworthy life lowers that newspaper's level of rationality and openmindedness, at least in my eyes. Even if they do it just to pander to their readers, this means that they are that much less likely to treat religious matters with an open mind for fear of offending said readers. On average, how many articles critical of religion are found in the religious section of the CSM (or any other newspaper with a religious section)? How many times do they say in interviews "yes, but isn't your war on love just a little counter-productive?" or "yes, but wouldn't the secular humanist way of doing things be a little better in this circumstance?" I don't read any religious section, so I couldn't say, but I would hazzard a guess that religious points of view are almost never questioned in any fashion. Compare that to an article in the main section or business section or whatever--those issues typically do get at least a modicum of objectivity.
Anyway, my $0.02, feel free to mod me down now.
None of the newspapers and news magazines I read (even the mainstream ones--Florida Today, our local county paper, etc.) have religious sections, nor do they go out of their way to publish religious material on a daily basis. Perhaps some (many?) other periodicals do this, and if so I would submit to you that they also have at least a bit of a religious slant.
If you think that Wikipedia can confirm anything, you're a fool and don't understand the reliability of that enterprise nor the purpose of encyclopedias.
And you're a fool if you think that a paper encyclopedia is more reliable. Wikipedia has serious problems, I grant you (they really need a slashdot-style moderation system--this "everyone has equal power over each other" system is BS.), but at least the errors and biases that crop up are usually (eventually) addressed. Wikipedia is better at keeping up to date, too.
I have heard (and wikipedia confirms) that at the request of the founder, there is always at least one religious article per issue. I cannot comment on the quality of their general articles (though I've heard they've done some good stuff) or the quality/tone of their mandated daily religious article, but you can't really say that they have "no religious slant" if they are, in fact, going out of their way to run at least one religious article per issue.
I realize this is a joke, but nuclear weapons are scary/powerful enough for anyone's tastes. See my other post regarding Cobalt-jacketed fusion bombs.
Most people don't seem to realize that the perfect doomsday device has already been invented 30+ years ago, at least on paper.
I don't know... even Dubya's stupidty would have to be running at unusually high levels if he (or someone like him... oh dear god PLEASE not Jeb Bush/'08) ordered a nuclear attack against ANY nation that had not attacked the USA with nukes. North Korea is not stupid to do such a thing (vs. South Korea *maybe*, but even then the USA would be shooting itself in both feet if it nuked North Korea in response.) Iran... now that's another story.
Fusion bombs can be clean. The great misconception is that they are always clean, or even that they are desired to be clean by the military. Take a fusion bomb and wrap it with Uranium-238--under these conditions, this so-called "depleted" Uranium suddenly becomes very fissile indeed, and the resulting explosion will be many times bigger. As an added bonus, extremely intense neutron radiation is produced, enough to instantly kill anyone lucky enough to survive the blast (even those in fallout shelters, unless their shelters have many feet of lead shielding or buried very deeply underground) and generate amounts of fallout.
But it gets better. Instead of U-238, you can surround the fusion stage with "salt", a non-radioactive isotope that is transmuted into a highly radioactive isotope from the resulting neutron bombardment. The most infamous candidate is Cobalt-59. In a fission-fusion-fission bomb with the last "fission" stage omitted and a Cobalt-59 jacket substituted, the neutron flux will turn most of it into Cobalt-60 and the blast will scatter it across the land. Cobalt-60 is very unique, in that it puts out enough gamma rays to be very lethal (as in you *will* die if exposed to it for longer than a month or so. Not die as in die of cancer 20 years from now--you'll succumb to radiation poisoning), yet it has a relatively long half-life--around five years.
In another thread someone joked that nuclear weapons were passe--that we should be moving on to antimatter or something. Trust me, nuclear is quite scary enough. Depending on the wind conditions, a single bomb could quite literally destroy all life on the east coast of the USA. Make no mistake about it, if we really wanted to we could build enough Cobalt bombs to destroy all life on the planet. We take comfort in the fact that we're not crazy enough to do something like that, but I am not entirely convinced that Iran is similarly sane. MAD (Mutually Assured Distruction) worked against the relatively rational, aetheistic Soviets... but now we're up against cultures and ideologies that glorify martyrdom and kamikaze attacks to a ridiculous degree. I'm really not sure what's going to happen, but I feel most people in this country have become far to complacent, far too comfortable with the idea of nuclear weapons that everyone has but no one uses.
Let me hasten to say that on the other end of the spectrum are the retards who become hysterical every time the word "radiation" or "nuclear" is mentioned (fun fact--a single coal power plant pumps more radioactive particles into our atmosphere and water supply in a year than the three mile island accident), but we shouldn't forget that in the wrong hands, these weapons have very real potential as doomsday devices.
You forgot the "Oh wait..."
It was not intended to be sincere. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with satire will recognize the obvious clues.
err, meant to say "and less than 1% argon."
Nitrogen isn't completely inert (as others have noted.) Wikipedia confirms my somewhat-hazy memory--titanium does indeed burn in a pure nitrogen atmosphere. I'm not sure about argon vs. nitrogen, but as the earth's atmosphere is 70% nitrogen and 1% argon, I'm not really sure that's an issue.
Titanium is much heavier than Aluminium, so I don't see titanium soda cans or anything on the horizon (bikes, probably. Planes... maybe partially.) However, in many cases it's a very strong contender for replacing steel. Unless the metal is going to be getting extremely hot (IIRC, at over 800 degrees C titanium will burn in a nitrogen atmosphere) or you need it to be magnetic, titanium offers 40% less weight and 30% increased strength over steel.
It's win/win. A titanium car will get better gas milage due to weight reduction, yet would fare better in an accident than a similarly-sized steel car. A titanium construction beam will support more than a steel beam while putting less stress on the supports below it.
The Genuine Advantage tool doesn't lock your system. It just doesn't let you download cool freebies (at this time).
Errr, I wouldn't exactly call critical security updates "cool freebies".
Yes. If you fail to read the contracts you agree to, you may very well have your first-born taken away from you.
Nope. Human trafficing is illegal. You see, the government can and does put limits on what you can sign away. You cannot sign away your right to resell an OEM copy of windows, for example--even though Microsoft claims this is against contract and cowardly (or shrewd, I suppose) corps like eBay try to enforce the ban, it has absolutely no legal weight because of the First-Sale Doctrine (US Copyright Act, section 109.)
It *is* just a piece of text. Just because something is written in there doesn't make it legal or enforceable.
Win98SE is probably the most stable and least problematic version of Windows ever. Seriously.
Goddamn man, where do you get your acid? It's been years since I've been able to find the good stuff!
Seriously, you're either on drugs or you've never used 98SE for a significant length of time.