What you consider a "manufactured" issue, is only an issue because the government does things like try and set up shit like government funded health care and then makes pro-lifers not only have to accept that abortion is legal, they will then face the very real possibility that their tax money is paying for it. You'd probably find that most pro-lifers don't like abortions at all, but would probably leave well-enough alone if it really was between the women and her own body and didn't include their wallets too.
Man, if you want to talk about objectionable things the government does that are funded by tax dollars you have no choice but to pay, abortion is damn near at the bottom of the list. How nice for the pro-lifers that they might even get their way on their pet issue. Meanwhile, how many pointless, destructive wars (which harmed more people than every abortion clinic combined) have my tax dollars funded and where's my media talking head explaining why I should have a choice? How many nonviolent criminals have we locked up for nothing except that they possessed a forbidden plant that I had to help fund? In this case the pro-lifers sound like a bunch of spoiled brats who are used to getting their way.
Anyway, if you want to see how manufactured it is, look at the timing. These things don't come up during times of peace and quiet when nothing is really going on, like the "slow news day" pieces they properly are. They come up when there is some kind of crisis or another. Or an election. It's a distraction.
In this particular case with contraception, the leftists and the media (lots of overlap there) realize that many people are dissatisfied with Obama and would love a president from the other party who seems to have his shit together regarding some important and mostly fiscal issues. The whole contraception deal was carefully fed to the candidates because the Republicans have one major electoral weakness: they tend to cater to a certain phony "Christian" (that is, Churchian) brand of "morality" (i.e. what offends them) that causes them to be obsessed with things like abortion, contraception, anything related to the sex taboo really. Mainstream Republicans are suckers for this. They just can't resist the topic. They will argue about abortion while Rome burns before they'll grab a firehose.
Bringing up contraception came from the media and it was an effective way to throw a monkey-wrench into the Republican primaries. The fact that no one is trying to outlaw contraception (and in fact organizations like Planned Parenthood often provide it for free) doesn't enter into it. It becomes an instant "moral" crusade, a chance to parade how "Christian" they are. Make no mistake; it was a deliberate, pre-planned, top-down, carefully executed maneuver designed to leverage the vast clout the Democrats enjoy in the media.
You want people to be elected who will fix the government and not be elected for distracting social issues?
When the nation is going bankrupt and is poised to become the next Greece, any and all social issues are nothing but distractions. Worrying about shit like contraception (that no one is trying to ban anyway) is and should be a luxury reserved for prosperous times.
And something tells me you haven't. (I'll give you a hint: The abortion rates are much lower).
I'm not really surprised when a group known for its higher-than-average proportion of pro-life people has lower rates of abortion. It's like telling me that Hasidic Jews eat less bacon than the general population. Both are orthogonal to the question of how many pregnancies are happening, though.
Please tell me you're not that naive. A vast majority of the time, kids are already exposed to many of the ills of life ("like casual unprotected sex.") long before they turn 18. Those who have been taught otherwise are more likely to avoid those situations. There are exceptions, and parents who push too hard are more likely to get active rebellion.
This is where we agree more than you seem to think. I was talking about the difference between "don't do this - it's a sin! - and because I said so!" versus "you may feel tempted to engage in certain things, but we want something better than that for you, here's why those temptations might not be in your best interests, the door is open if you ever need our support." combined with good communication and involvement The former is "pushing too hard". The latter is showing that you have reason.
The fact that they will be exposed to these things from peers etc. and the certainty of that means that if they aren't getting a calm, wise, overriding reason at home, they're going to succumb. I assume that part is a given and wrote my previous post accounting for it. I have no idea why you didn't notice that and feel a need now to point it out.
Honestly I think you would find a read of this thread edifying. As an AC was kind enough to explain to me, you're violating the principle of generosity.
Please note that those weren't just religious prohibitions. They were transmitted that way, sure, but they wouldn't have survived any better than blood sacrifice if those societies didn't see wisdom in them.
Again you take the most superficial interpretation available of what I said. Were you familiar with my previous posts you would know I'm one of those few holdouts who reject modern relativism. Thus, when I describe religious prohibitions, I am not talking about the behaviors or their justifications. I am talking about the way they are transmitted. Too many religious people take a "because God said so!" approach that amounts to a list of what not to do. It's just so much better to drop the appeal to authority and understand why something is wrong.
Uh, yeah? No duh? And please note that you're talking about people taking risks with the lives of their unborn children.
The way you say that, "unborn children"... is that what you're so excited about, why you're using a nagging tone? Are you treating this like a hot-button abortion debate? It isn't. We were talking about premarital sex/pregnancy and divorce. Abortion didn't enter into it. You were the one to bring that one up. It is your particular fixation.
Windows Vista alienated many corporates, who went straight from XP to Windows 7.
So when Microsoft alienates their customers, they retaliate by switching from a Microsoft product to another Microsoft product. Yeah, that'll show 'em!
Oh stop using the word terrorism unless you're talking about a non-government group using terror in order to achieve a political objective. If you can't explain why something is wrong without labelling it as something it's not then I'll assume you're just trying to imply guilt by association.
I am a law-abiding citizen. I am also much, much more likely to be harmed in some way or another by my government or someone in their employment that ANY foreign terrorist. At least the government would try to look like they're going after any foreign terrorist who strikes American soil. By contrast, a government agent who harms me in some way (legally or not) is unlikely to ever face a penalty of any kind. Without doing a Google search, when's the last time you recall hearing about a police officer who was prosecuted and put in prison for abusing his power? Do you think they never abuse their power?
You're right, they are not terrorists. Terrorists couldn't do that much damage for that long to that many millions of people in their wildest wet dreams. They are worse than terrorists. They've been that way ever since the statesman was replaced by the career politician.
I was surprised to discover the rate of premarital pregnancy and divorce was actually HIGHER among church-going Christians then the general population.
It's not really a surprise when you think about it. A lot of well-meaning (but naive) Christians raise their kids in a heavily sheltered environment. Then they turn 18, go out on their own, and receive the shock of their lives when they are suddenly confronted with decisions they were never prepared to face. It's not a surprise that as young adults, they would engage in risky behavior like casual unprotected sex.
A laundry list of "dos and don'ts" doesn't build character or cultivate wisdom, it just prohibits. It transmits little or no understanding and even less ability to reason through a situation and make good decisions. Such religious prohibition combined with severe social stigma may have mostly worked during the 1950s, among the Puritans, and during the Victorian Era, but there aren't so many external restraints governing consenting adults anymore. I consider that a good thing, but it doesn't produce good results if there is no internal decision-making that can plan ahead and evaluate risk.
If the inability to evaluate cause-and-effect in order to consider the ramifications of one's decisions is a disease, I say we are suffering a pandemic. Doing whatever feels good in the moment with no thought to secondary and tertiary effects sounds great but it doesn't result in a life that most people would want to be stuck with.
Speaking of your discovery, have you ever met a woman who is a pastor's daughter? They have quite the reputation. Sure it's a stereotype, but it has some basis in fact.
If this actually works out. You'll start seeing some FUD over this from the big game houses like EA.
When large governmental or corporate interests are against something and launch FUD campaigns against it, in my eyes whatever they're railing against couldn't possibly have received a better endorsement. "Consider the source". The next most priceless event is when that Puritannical "you must live as I do" mentality gets its panties in a wad.
He's violating the principle of generosity. When debating somebody, you invariably come across a statement that could be interpreted in several ways. The principle of generosity says that you should try to interpret this in the best way, which makes the strongest argument, and assume that that's what he meant. Be generous to his argument, in other words.
The usual instinct people have is to take the most idiotic interpretation and use that, since it's easier to attack. But as we see in the GP, it doesn't help your side, it just makes you look like a jackass. Which is why, if you're interested in winning your argument, you need to be generous.
It just seemed so natural and obvious to me that I didn't realize there was a term for it. Thank you -- seriously, you have educated me today.
I agree with you about the nature of it but I disagree in terms of emphasis. You're correct that this kind of impatient "I must be right and you must be wrong so easy-to-attack is all I care about" mentality doesn't work very well and often backfires. But I don't really view it so much in terms of working or not working.
To me it's the product of an (emotionally) immature mind. It's like the two-year-old who has to be first in line, has to have the biggest piece of candy, etc. People like him think that if you say "hey, that's a great point and you've changed my mind about this" then you have lost something. Avoiding that is their major priority because they're coming from a puerile ego level. It has no concern for the truth; truth is something to be downplayed or spun in whatever way is convenient.
I think that's bullshit. If you really want to be right so badly, you start by realizing you don't automatically have all the answers.
Patronage still exists, and indeed is how most creative works are funded. It's just that now the patrons are not kings, they're publishers. They give creative people an interest free loan to fund the cost of creating the work, and then they own it. The only difference now is cutting out the middlemen.
Not to quibble but I see them as fundamentally different, both in intent and execution. About the only thing they have in common is that they are both a way to get creative works done.
Patronage was more personal and it was more like sponsoring or hiring someone. You pay the artist, he produces the work. In its heyday there was no easy way to mass-produce copies of a work; if a great painter made a portrait of a king, you could not distribute millions of copies of it. It was much more... personal. It was not a loan. The artist produced the work for the patron and that was that, end of transaction. There was not an ongoing obligation like modern publishers often demand.
If anything it was more like the way we give government grants to academics to conduct studies and research; you wouldn't really call that a "loan".
The Beatles should have skipped making Abbey Road because they were, according to you, shit musicians for not playing concerts any more?
What's more, most people listen to music an order of magnitude more than they listen to music at concerts, and you want musicians to minimize the album quality so it's just good enough to convince people to see them live? That's idiotic.
I never understood this style of "debate" because it completely throws out the concept of entertaining an idea regardless of whether you agree. It's frankly infantile.
I believe the thought is something like this: "I don't like this idea, so I'm going to be completely dense, take it to the most ridiculously absurd extreme possible instead of trying to see how it may work if done reasonably, and then declare that it's idiotic." No, your methods are idiotic.
This idea may or may not work out. That remains to be seen because we still have traditional copyright. What I can say for certain is that no one who ever truly innovated and changed things for the better approached new ideas the way that you do. Ever heard the saying that if all possible (as opposed to reasonable) objections must first be overcome, nothing would ever get done?
Sure. Anytime it looks like anyone might want to examine or change that, a manufactured issue is raised and immediately promoted to BIG FUCKING DEAL status by the media. "What? Oh no, don't worry about that, hey look over there!"
Usually the manufactured issue is abortion, or guns, or the old standby of income disparity (aka class warfare, the kind that exists to create controversy with no intention of changing anything because that would remove an issue that's just too damned useful). Lately it's contraception. It's always a non-issue compared to more pressing problems. It's always a completely polar topic with no hope of changing anyone's mind on the subject. The principle is an old one: divide and conquer. Consider how damnably stupid the government-educated* majority has to be to never recognize the pattern.
Until the majority stops being so stupid and gullible and develops an attention span longer than fifteen seconds, it will remain this way.
* Did that hit a sore spot? Good. If you have any sense and any guts, then you would have never trusted anything half as important as your education to those assholes. Going to a public school because it's compulsory doesn't stop you from also educating yourself.
Why would one spend thousands in legal fees? I mean, if somebody is willing to pay somebody to keep their mouth shut about something, then they are already clearly at a disadvantaged point anyways. I mean, if you don't have any proof of what you're supposed to keep quite about, then there's not any sense in them offering you a payout anyways, since it would be your word against theirs. And as long as you had such proof, you could trivially present it in court yourself... no legal fees involved whatsoever.
If you think American courtrooms are a place where everyone is truly equal in the eyes of impartial law, honest guys always win, where you have nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong, and having the facts on your side means you will certainly prevail without tremendous cost and heartache to yourself... well... perhaps one day in a more enlightened future we'll have something like that, but we definitely don't have it now.
And the thing about having someone at a disadvantage is to understand it is rarely absolute. Sun Tzu talks about never allowing your forces to completely surround a disadvantaged enemy and cut off all possible avenues of escape because desperate men will fight very hard, causing you grave losses (and making them that desperate is not something you need to do to have victory, just something you might do for your own short-sighted gratification). It's just a metaphor for the value of wisely used restraint.
You may have the advantage over a company of an embarassing incident that would make them look bad for about a week or two until the next scandal at the next company. They may pay you to go away and keep it to yourself because the bad PR and expense of playing hardball isn't worth their while. But if you want to press the matter, you'll find yourself against an immortal nonhuman organization with very deep pockets that can tie up years of your life and many thousands of your dollars. Oh, and you still might lose.
The settlement system works because most people are simply not that dedicated and rarely feel like they have a good reason to be. It's quite enticing to them when they receive an offer to take a decent sum of money they can have right now.
The one time the Slashdot groupthink is actually against Open Source code and privacy and software freedom... is when it makes a statement against Google.
Since this particular statement cuts to the core of how Google makes its money, namely through acquiring marketing data from mostly hapless and unsuspecting users who have no idea how much information they are "contributing", and wouldn't if they did, it's too fundamental of a comment to be tolerated by the fanboys.
So you're being punished by the more impotent and bed-wetting type of mods for telling the truth. That's a badge of honor.
I mean, it's not like they were going to take you on with facts and explain why you're completely mistaken. They can't. So, like all other cowards, they lash out the only way they can. That's all. Nothing hard to understand about it.
They did the risk analysis and determined that putting all kinds of effort into making their external webserver was not worth it. This gives them more resources to secure what actually matters, the internal stuff.
In terms of cold logic, devoid of any notion of PR or politics or marketing, I agree with you. Unfortunately a business environment includes those things as well.
The problem is that a company wanting to convince potential clients of its security expertise really wouldn't want this kind of PR. Allowing this to happen is a bad move. It would be reasonable for potential customers to ask, "if they couldn't secure their own server that they have or should have had full control over, how are they possibly going to secure *my* equipment?"
"Irony" is defined as "poignantly contrary to expectation". If you find the hacking of any "compusec" company ironic, the problem is in your unrealistic expectations.
If you must have a dictionary definition, perhaps you would read this link and see Number Five.
And yeah, I expect a "security company" to have a basic level of security. They accomplish at least that much, or they fail in a way I find comical. This one failed. It is possible for others to be more successful. This is determined solely by a given company's performance. "Unrealistic?" Only if you assumed I was shocked or surprised that some company somewhere failed at something. But you see, I never said that; I indicated amusement, not shock, making this false assumption of yours your very own realism FAIL.
That shouldn't be hard to understand, so what's the problem? That I got a laugh out of it? That perhaps you didn't? I hope you're just trolling, or maybe having a bad day, and aren't actually this much of a bitch.
And those two shall continue in pointless vandalism that no one beyond their twitter followers and the people cleaning up after them care about.
You're excluding a significant group: those who appreciate irony. I mean, it's a security company. You'd expect them to know how to secure a Web server (or to choose a quality hosting service if they don't run it themselves).
Look, I love you for all the things you say. But I smell troll. So it's better if you just leave it alone, too.
It's extremely difficult to convince people who are so sure of themselves, even if that what they're so sure about doesn't hold water.
I appreciate what you're saying. If that AC were the only one who could have seen what I wrote, I wouldn't have bothered. It would unfortunately be little more than pearls before swine, though I hold out the hope that when he decides he's better than swine he'll remember that someone spoke to him as an equal and appreciate the grace he was shown.
Troll or no, my hope is that an explanation coming from a spiritual place of what is and isn't a wholesome way to relate to anyone or anything would have had value to someone. If a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool troll gives me cause to provide that, then I would say the situation is redeemed no matter what he intended. I like that because then his bullshit intentions are solely his own problem, as they should be.
In this case, it means "everyone else". Like when people think about their driving skill -- everyone else sucks.
The problem is they hand out licenses to anyone who wants them. In my state they want you to memorize road signs and regulations but they do not require you to demonstrate any actual skill with the vehicle or basic knowledge of physics. Hence we have people who are panicky, don't know how to correct without overcorrecting, who tailgate, brake while cornering, unnecessarily brake uphill, and don't understand what banked curves are (when they're not too busy crossing over the median towards opposing traffic that is). The older people who have 25-30 years of "experience" have simply repeated the same uncorrected bad habits for that time. That's what "experience" means to them. It doesn't mean critically evaluating their own performance and trying to improve it.
The state could deal with this using a driving simulator that throws certain surprise situations at the prospective driver to see if they have learned how to handle them. Certain behaviors like tailgating or weaving out of your lane like most SUV drivers do results in no license for you for X period of years. Behaviors like not knowing how to properly corner or not realizing that you have more traction available for steering when you're not also braking results in more training.
Voting is tougher. In the early days of the USA, only a small minority could vote. You had to be white, male, and you had to own land at a time when most people didn't. Obviously the requirement that voters be white was plain racism, though at the time the same racism meant only whites would be educated. The exclusion of women meant that what we now call "big government" proposals had less support automatically (this has been proven and I don't care how anyone feels about facts - women tend to look for security from an external source and the government is only too happy to offer it). The exclusion of anyone who didn't own land tended to mean the voters were educated and prosperous enough that they could devote time to being active in politics.
Oh and the fact that Senators were appointed by the states to represent the states meant you had one part of the legislature that didn't have to run campaigns, didn't have to worry about the way the wind was blowing, and could actually vote their conscience. Changing that was a bad idea. It was an important check against the soundbite-driven (well really headline-driven, back then) world we know today.
What I'd like to see is some kind of very tough civics test as a requirement for voting. It should be as openly and transparently administered as possible, so that anyone who wants to study and learn could pass it but very few who didn't care to study would stand a chance. In addition, anyone currently receiving some form of "entitlement" should not get to vote because what they're going to vote for is not difficult to guess and this situation is too exploitable and too dangerous for our long-term survival. The last thing I would change is that all campaigns be publically funded, each candidate gets a very generous amount, and any other "contributions" are treasonous bribery resulting in a death penalty for the candidate and 20 years in prison for the one "contributing" the money.
With something like that, we could have a nation again.
And a stoner who models their life after "Cheech & Chong" is mature? I'm sorry, but if you need mind altering substances to bring value to your life, then you must have a pretty horrid life.
I don't believe it is proper to model one's life after any stereotype or Hollywood image. I'd rather be an individual and so would anyone else who truly understands what this means. That this model in particular bothers you is irrelevant to me. To me, they are all equally abhorrent and phony when viewed as anything more than entertainment.
The hinge of your statement is "need". Mind altering substances can also be appreciated. I would say that if you need to use a Web site to bring value to your life, that's also a horrid life. Yet, someone can use and enjoy a Web site without making it the center of one's existence. You could say that about hobbies, movies, relationships, anything really; for all of those things there is an unhealthy way of being too attached to them and giving them undue importance. We call the the unhealthy ones fanboys, zealots, and codependents. We call the healthy ones people who enjoy their free time.
To treat drugs as anything unusual or special is your particular hang-up. The inability to recognize it as such that prompts you to blame others for not living as you do is a character flaw and an area in which you are emotionally immature. It is the difference between someone who simply does not belong to a religion but honors the freedom of those who do, versus someone who hates all religious people and would love to shut down every church. You merely found a form of bigotry that is less likely to be challenged than hating people of faith, people of color, people of a particular gender, etc.
This beers for you? Props for my homies while spilling out malt liquor? Dedicated his next toxic cigarette?
You can be physically addicted to both alcohol and cigarettes. No so with marijauna.
Of course... there is also the fact that alcohol and cigarettes kill vastly more people each year and are a tremendous burden on the economy with health care costs.... but you keep right at it with the baseless denigration of the poster simply because of his preference on how he relaxes and achieves an altered state.
There is no difference between the raising a glass of wine/beer and toasting this man, and raising a bowl to do the same. The sentiment is the same.
If he doesn't look down his nose at you because you ingest a substance he doesn't approve of, it will be because you listen to music he doesn't approve of or read books he wouldn't read himself. That kind of false superiority is the only kind of self-hood people like him have.
In short, he is not mature enough to be reasoned with in an adult manner.
McCarren says police dislocated her shoulder and tore her rotator cuff in the incident. Neither she nor her cameraman, Peter Hakel, was ever charged with any violations.
That's strange. I'm not a lawyer so I hope someone will correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand it, if a cop physically harms you but does not charge you with resisting arrest, he is effectively admitting he assaulted you for no reason.
At the time of the incident county officials, including County Executive Jack Johnson, said none of the cameras in the seven police cars was working.
Ever heard of a contract of adhesion? It's when a big entity like your insurance company draws up a standard contract. You have little or no ability to negotiate the wording or terms of the contract. It's a take-it-or-leave-it deal. The flip side is that any unclear or unspecified terms in that contract are automatically interpreted in your favor.
We need a concept like that for police and their "broken" dashboard cameras. If the cameras are faulty or footage is missing, it is assumed that whatever story the citizen tells is the correct one. Overnight, police departments would suddenly start doing a better job maintaining their "faulty" equipment.
Can you perfectly control what everyone else says or does with information about you anywhere? This is not a Facebook problem, the solution is to find better friends.
It would normally be difficult to aggregate and analyze all of that information in a single central place. At least without a court order. Facebook is a system designed to do just that, with no court order needed since you agreed to give them permission to the data. To ignore that obvious fact means you are either being dishonest or you're performing mental gymnastics to rationalize away legitimate concerns about Facebook, no doubt to dismiss the foolishness of using it. Otherwise it would be hard to continue doing so, which you fully intend to do.
No, it's not difficult to see what's happening here and it's really transparent. You're just a different kind of fanboy and those pesky facts won't stop you. A Microsoft fanboy has to downplay the whole abuse of monopoly thing. An Apple fanboy has to downplay the disadvantages of walled gardens. You have to downplay the fact that the system is carefully designed to separate users from their privacy. That kind of selective blindness is a step towards psychosis, you know.
Further, I appreciate the way I disagree with you, therefore I must have horrible friends (and by extension be a horrible person myself), but I tire of these little childish stabs that have no place in rational discourse. Facebook's privacy settings, even with friends who use them perfectly, don't stop Facebook and its marketers from analyzing data everyone posts to Facebook. My friends have the decency and self-respect not to betray my trust, but that's no good if I am communicating with them and the medium of communication itself is untrustworthy.
In the case of using Facebook while desiring privacy, that's the situation. Thus, I don't use Facebook and neither do my friends. Isn't that so much easier than trying to perfectly control everybody else? When you don't use a system designed to violate privacy in the first place, suddenly there is no need for that.
This is a problem quite unique to Facebook and systems like Facebook (such as MySpace before it, etc). Trying to generalize it the way you are doing in order to obfuscate that fact is beneath you, or should be.
Slashdot Mirror
What you consider a "manufactured" issue, is only an issue because the government does things like try and set up shit like government funded health care and then makes pro-lifers not only have to accept that abortion is legal, they will then face the very real possibility that their tax money is paying for it. You'd probably find that most pro-lifers don't like abortions at all, but would probably leave well-enough alone if it really was between the women and her own body and didn't include their wallets too.
Man, if you want to talk about objectionable things the government does that are funded by tax dollars you have no choice but to pay, abortion is damn near at the bottom of the list. How nice for the pro-lifers that they might even get their way on their pet issue. Meanwhile, how many pointless, destructive wars (which harmed more people than every abortion clinic combined) have my tax dollars funded and where's my media talking head explaining why I should have a choice? How many nonviolent criminals have we locked up for nothing except that they possessed a forbidden plant that I had to help fund? In this case the pro-lifers sound like a bunch of spoiled brats who are used to getting their way.
Anyway, if you want to see how manufactured it is, look at the timing. These things don't come up during times of peace and quiet when nothing is really going on, like the "slow news day" pieces they properly are. They come up when there is some kind of crisis or another. Or an election. It's a distraction.
In this particular case with contraception, the leftists and the media (lots of overlap there) realize that many people are dissatisfied with Obama and would love a president from the other party who seems to have his shit together regarding some important and mostly fiscal issues. The whole contraception deal was carefully fed to the candidates because the Republicans have one major electoral weakness: they tend to cater to a certain phony "Christian" (that is, Churchian) brand of "morality" (i.e. what offends them) that causes them to be obsessed with things like abortion, contraception, anything related to the sex taboo really. Mainstream Republicans are suckers for this. They just can't resist the topic. They will argue about abortion while Rome burns before they'll grab a firehose.
Bringing up contraception came from the media and it was an effective way to throw a monkey-wrench into the Republican primaries. The fact that no one is trying to outlaw contraception (and in fact organizations like Planned Parenthood often provide it for free) doesn't enter into it. It becomes an instant "moral" crusade, a chance to parade how "Christian" they are. Make no mistake; it was a deliberate, pre-planned, top-down, carefully executed maneuver designed to leverage the vast clout the Democrats enjoy in the media.
You want people to be elected who will fix the government and not be elected for distracting social issues?
When the nation is going bankrupt and is poised to become the next Greece, any and all social issues are nothing but distractions. Worrying about shit like contraception (that no one is trying to ban anyway) is and should be a luxury reserved for prosperous times.
And something tells me you haven't. (I'll give you a hint: The abortion rates are much lower).
I'm not really surprised when a group known for its higher-than-average proportion of pro-life people has lower rates of abortion. It's like telling me that Hasidic Jews eat less bacon than the general population. Both are orthogonal to the question of how many pregnancies are happening, though.
Please tell me you're not that naive. A vast majority of the time, kids are already exposed to many of the ills of life ("like casual unprotected sex.") long before they turn 18. Those who have been taught otherwise are more likely to avoid those situations. There are exceptions, and parents who push too hard are more likely to get active rebellion.
This is where we agree more than you seem to think. I was talking about the difference between "don't do this - it's a sin! - and because I said so!" versus "you may feel tempted to engage in certain things, but we want something better than that for you, here's why those temptations might not be in your best interests, the door is open if you ever need our support." combined with good communication and involvement The former is "pushing too hard". The latter is showing that you have reason.
The fact that they will be exposed to these things from peers etc. and the certainty of that means that if they aren't getting a calm, wise, overriding reason at home, they're going to succumb. I assume that part is a given and wrote my previous post accounting for it. I have no idea why you didn't notice that and feel a need now to point it out.
Honestly I think you would find a read of this thread edifying. As an AC was kind enough to explain to me, you're violating the principle of generosity.
Please note that those weren't just religious prohibitions. They were transmitted that way, sure, but they wouldn't have survived any better than blood sacrifice if those societies didn't see wisdom in them.
Again you take the most superficial interpretation available of what I said. Were you familiar with my previous posts you would know I'm one of those few holdouts who reject modern relativism. Thus, when I describe religious prohibitions, I am not talking about the behaviors or their justifications. I am talking about the way they are transmitted. Too many religious people take a "because God said so!" approach that amounts to a list of what not to do. It's just so much better to drop the appeal to authority and understand why something is wrong.
Uh, yeah? No duh? And please note that you're talking about people taking risks with the lives of their unborn children.
The way you say that, "unborn children"... is that what you're so excited about, why you're using a nagging tone? Are you treating this like a hot-button abortion debate? It isn't. We were talking about premarital sex/pregnancy and divorce. Abortion didn't enter into it. You were the one to bring that one up. It is your particular fixation.
"I am also much, much more likely to be harmed in some way or another by my government or someone in their employment that ANY foreign terrorist."
What is it with you Americans? It's MORE THAN, not 'more THAT'...
"that ANY foreign terrorist"
That? That?
It was a typo. Next time, try checking out my posting history and see if it's unusual for me to do that before complaining.
Now really if that's your sole contribution, it is unworthy and a waste of our time.
Windows Vista alienated many corporates, who went straight from XP to Windows 7.
So when Microsoft alienates their customers, they retaliate by switching from a Microsoft product to another Microsoft product. Yeah, that'll show 'em!
Oh stop using the word terrorism unless you're talking about a non-government group using terror in order to achieve a political objective. If you can't explain why something is wrong without labelling it as something it's not then I'll assume you're just trying to imply guilt by association.
I am a law-abiding citizen. I am also much, much more likely to be harmed in some way or another by my government or someone in their employment that ANY foreign terrorist. At least the government would try to look like they're going after any foreign terrorist who strikes American soil. By contrast, a government agent who harms me in some way (legally or not) is unlikely to ever face a penalty of any kind. Without doing a Google search, when's the last time you recall hearing about a police officer who was prosecuted and put in prison for abusing his power? Do you think they never abuse their power?
You're right, they are not terrorists. Terrorists couldn't do that much damage for that long to that many millions of people in their wildest wet dreams. They are worse than terrorists. They've been that way ever since the statesman was replaced by the career politician.
I was surprised to discover the rate of premarital pregnancy and divorce was actually HIGHER among church-going Christians then the general population.
It's not really a surprise when you think about it. A lot of well-meaning (but naive) Christians raise their kids in a heavily sheltered environment. Then they turn 18, go out on their own, and receive the shock of their lives when they are suddenly confronted with decisions they were never prepared to face. It's not a surprise that as young adults, they would engage in risky behavior like casual unprotected sex.
A laundry list of "dos and don'ts" doesn't build character or cultivate wisdom, it just prohibits. It transmits little or no understanding and even less ability to reason through a situation and make good decisions. Such religious prohibition combined with severe social stigma may have mostly worked during the 1950s, among the Puritans, and during the Victorian Era, but there aren't so many external restraints governing consenting adults anymore. I consider that a good thing, but it doesn't produce good results if there is no internal decision-making that can plan ahead and evaluate risk.
If the inability to evaluate cause-and-effect in order to consider the ramifications of one's decisions is a disease, I say we are suffering a pandemic. Doing whatever feels good in the moment with no thought to secondary and tertiary effects sounds great but it doesn't result in a life that most people would want to be stuck with.
Speaking of your discovery, have you ever met a woman who is a pastor's daughter? They have quite the reputation. Sure it's a stereotype, but it has some basis in fact.
If this actually works out. You'll start seeing some FUD over this from the big game houses like EA.
When large governmental or corporate interests are against something and launch FUD campaigns against it, in my eyes whatever they're railing against couldn't possibly have received a better endorsement. "Consider the source". The next most priceless event is when that Puritannical "you must live as I do" mentality gets its panties in a wad.
He's violating the principle of generosity. When debating somebody, you invariably come across a statement that could be interpreted in several ways. The principle of generosity says that you should try to interpret this in the best way, which makes the strongest argument, and assume that that's what he meant. Be generous to his argument, in other words.
The usual instinct people have is to take the most idiotic interpretation and use that, since it's easier to attack. But as we see in the GP, it doesn't help your side, it just makes you look like a jackass. Which is why, if you're interested in winning your argument, you need to be generous.
It just seemed so natural and obvious to me that I didn't realize there was a term for it. Thank you -- seriously, you have educated me today.
I agree with you about the nature of it but I disagree in terms of emphasis. You're correct that this kind of impatient "I must be right and you must be wrong so easy-to-attack is all I care about" mentality doesn't work very well and often backfires. But I don't really view it so much in terms of working or not working.
To me it's the product of an (emotionally) immature mind. It's like the two-year-old who has to be first in line, has to have the biggest piece of candy, etc. People like him think that if you say "hey, that's a great point and you've changed my mind about this" then you have lost something. Avoiding that is their major priority because they're coming from a puerile ego level. It has no concern for the truth; truth is something to be downplayed or spun in whatever way is convenient.
I think that's bullshit. If you really want to be right so badly, you start by realizing you don't automatically have all the answers.
Patronage still exists, and indeed is how most creative works are funded. It's just that now the patrons are not kings, they're publishers. They give creative people an interest free loan to fund the cost of creating the work, and then they own it. The only difference now is cutting out the middlemen.
Not to quibble but I see them as fundamentally different, both in intent and execution. About the only thing they have in common is that they are both a way to get creative works done.
... personal. It was not a loan. The artist produced the work for the patron and that was that, end of transaction. There was not an ongoing obligation like modern publishers often demand.
Patronage was more personal and it was more like sponsoring or hiring someone. You pay the artist, he produces the work. In its heyday there was no easy way to mass-produce copies of a work; if a great painter made a portrait of a king, you could not distribute millions of copies of it. It was much more
If anything it was more like the way we give government grants to academics to conduct studies and research; you wouldn't really call that a "loan".
The Beatles should have skipped making Abbey Road because they were, according to you, shit musicians for not playing concerts any more? What's more, most people listen to music an order of magnitude more than they listen to music at concerts, and you want musicians to minimize the album quality so it's just good enough to convince people to see them live? That's idiotic.
I never understood this style of "debate" because it completely throws out the concept of entertaining an idea regardless of whether you agree. It's frankly infantile.
I believe the thought is something like this: "I don't like this idea, so I'm going to be completely dense, take it to the most ridiculously absurd extreme possible instead of trying to see how it may work if done reasonably, and then declare that it's idiotic." No, your methods are idiotic.
This idea may or may not work out. That remains to be seen because we still have traditional copyright. What I can say for certain is that no one who ever truly innovated and changed things for the better approached new ideas the way that you do. Ever heard the saying that if all possible (as opposed to reasonable) objections must first be overcome, nothing would ever get done?
Why is that a problem? With the grandparent's model, you're paid before you release your product.
Sometimes old ideas resurface and prove useful again. Before copyright, there was patronage.
It's just that now it's a crowd of regular folks instead of a single wealthy noble.
And looks like people are voting for it.
Sure. Anytime it looks like anyone might want to examine or change that, a manufactured issue is raised and immediately promoted to BIG FUCKING DEAL status by the media. "What? Oh no, don't worry about that, hey look over there!"
Usually the manufactured issue is abortion, or guns, or the old standby of income disparity (aka class warfare, the kind that exists to create controversy with no intention of changing anything because that would remove an issue that's just too damned useful). Lately it's contraception. It's always a non-issue compared to more pressing problems. It's always a completely polar topic with no hope of changing anyone's mind on the subject. The principle is an old one: divide and conquer. Consider how damnably stupid the government-educated* majority has to be to never recognize the pattern.
Until the majority stops being so stupid and gullible and develops an attention span longer than fifteen seconds, it will remain this way.
* Did that hit a sore spot? Good. If you have any sense and any guts, then you would have never trusted anything half as important as your education to those assholes. Going to a public school because it's compulsory doesn't stop you from also educating yourself.
Why would one spend thousands in legal fees? I mean, if somebody is willing to pay somebody to keep their mouth shut about something, then they are already clearly at a disadvantaged point anyways. I mean, if you don't have any proof of what you're supposed to keep quite about, then there's not any sense in them offering you a payout anyways, since it would be your word against theirs. And as long as you had such proof, you could trivially present it in court yourself... no legal fees involved whatsoever.
If you think American courtrooms are a place where everyone is truly equal in the eyes of impartial law, honest guys always win, where you have nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong, and having the facts on your side means you will certainly prevail without tremendous cost and heartache to yourself ... well ... perhaps one day in a more enlightened future we'll have something like that, but we definitely don't have it now.
And the thing about having someone at a disadvantage is to understand it is rarely absolute. Sun Tzu talks about never allowing your forces to completely surround a disadvantaged enemy and cut off all possible avenues of escape because desperate men will fight very hard, causing you grave losses (and making them that desperate is not something you need to do to have victory, just something you might do for your own short-sighted gratification). It's just a metaphor for the value of wisely used restraint.
You may have the advantage over a company of an embarassing incident that would make them look bad for about a week or two until the next scandal at the next company. They may pay you to go away and keep it to yourself because the bad PR and expense of playing hardball isn't worth their while. But if you want to press the matter, you'll find yourself against an immortal nonhuman organization with very deep pockets that can tie up years of your life and many thousands of your dollars. Oh, and you still might lose.
The settlement system works because most people are simply not that dedicated and rarely feel like they have a good reason to be. It's quite enticing to them when they receive an offer to take a decent sum of money they can have right now.
Modded Troll??? Why? I was stating a truth (I don't use Google Chrome; I use the open source chromium).
Chromium LINK - http://www.softpedia.com/get/PORTABLE-SOFTWARE/Internet/Browsers/Portable-Google-Chrome-Chromium.shtml
The one time the Slashdot groupthink is actually against Open Source code and privacy and software freedom ... is when it makes a statement against Google.
Since this particular statement cuts to the core of how Google makes its money, namely through acquiring marketing data from mostly hapless and unsuspecting users who have no idea how much information they are "contributing", and wouldn't if they did, it's too fundamental of a comment to be tolerated by the fanboys.
So you're being punished by the more impotent and bed-wetting type of mods for telling the truth. That's a badge of honor.
I mean, it's not like they were going to take you on with facts and explain why you're completely mistaken. They can't. So, like all other cowards, they lash out the only way they can. That's all. Nothing hard to understand about it.
Yes and no. I see it this way:
They did the risk analysis and determined that putting all kinds of effort into making their external webserver was not worth it. This gives them more resources to secure what actually matters, the internal stuff.
In terms of cold logic, devoid of any notion of PR or politics or marketing, I agree with you. Unfortunately a business environment includes those things as well.
The problem is that a company wanting to convince potential clients of its security expertise really wouldn't want this kind of PR. Allowing this to happen is a bad move. It would be reasonable for potential customers to ask, "if they couldn't secure their own server that they have or should have had full control over, how are they possibly going to secure *my* equipment?"
"Irony" is defined as "poignantly contrary to expectation". If you find the hacking of any "compusec" company ironic, the problem is in your unrealistic expectations.
If you must have a dictionary definition, perhaps you would read this link and see Number Five.
And yeah, I expect a "security company" to have a basic level of security. They accomplish at least that much, or they fail in a way I find comical. This one failed. It is possible for others to be more successful. This is determined solely by a given company's performance. "Unrealistic?" Only if you assumed I was shocked or surprised that some company somewhere failed at something. But you see, I never said that; I indicated amusement, not shock, making this false assumption of yours your very own realism FAIL.
That shouldn't be hard to understand, so what's the problem? That I got a laugh out of it? That perhaps you didn't? I hope you're just trolling, or maybe having a bad day, and aren't actually this much of a bitch.
And those two shall continue in pointless vandalism that no one beyond their twitter followers and the people cleaning up after them care about.
You're excluding a significant group: those who appreciate irony. I mean, it's a security company. You'd expect them to know how to secure a Web server (or to choose a quality hosting service if they don't run it themselves).
You don't find that amusing?
blame others for not living as you do is a character flaw and an area in which you are emotionally immature
Yet here you are doing the same thing.
If you wish to see it that way, then you shall. There are none so blind as those who will not see...
Look, I love you for all the things you say. But I smell troll. So it's better if you just leave it alone, too.
It's extremely difficult to convince people who are so sure of themselves, even if that what they're so sure about doesn't hold water.
I appreciate what you're saying. If that AC were the only one who could have seen what I wrote, I wouldn't have bothered. It would unfortunately be little more than pearls before swine, though I hold out the hope that when he decides he's better than swine he'll remember that someone spoke to him as an equal and appreciate the grace he was shown.
Troll or no, my hope is that an explanation coming from a spiritual place of what is and isn't a wholesome way to relate to anyone or anything would have had value to someone. If a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool troll gives me cause to provide that, then I would say the situation is redeemed no matter what he intended. I like that because then his bullshit intentions are solely his own problem, as they should be.
In this case, it means "everyone else". Like when people think about their driving skill -- everyone else sucks.
The problem is they hand out licenses to anyone who wants them. In my state they want you to memorize road signs and regulations but they do not require you to demonstrate any actual skill with the vehicle or basic knowledge of physics. Hence we have people who are panicky, don't know how to correct without overcorrecting, who tailgate, brake while cornering, unnecessarily brake uphill, and don't understand what banked curves are (when they're not too busy crossing over the median towards opposing traffic that is). The older people who have 25-30 years of "experience" have simply repeated the same uncorrected bad habits for that time. That's what "experience" means to them. It doesn't mean critically evaluating their own performance and trying to improve it.
The state could deal with this using a driving simulator that throws certain surprise situations at the prospective driver to see if they have learned how to handle them. Certain behaviors like tailgating or weaving out of your lane like most SUV drivers do results in no license for you for X period of years. Behaviors like not knowing how to properly corner or not realizing that you have more traction available for steering when you're not also braking results in more training.
Voting is tougher. In the early days of the USA, only a small minority could vote. You had to be white, male, and you had to own land at a time when most people didn't. Obviously the requirement that voters be white was plain racism, though at the time the same racism meant only whites would be educated. The exclusion of women meant that what we now call "big government" proposals had less support automatically (this has been proven and I don't care how anyone feels about facts - women tend to look for security from an external source and the government is only too happy to offer it). The exclusion of anyone who didn't own land tended to mean the voters were educated and prosperous enough that they could devote time to being active in politics.
Oh and the fact that Senators were appointed by the states to represent the states meant you had one part of the legislature that didn't have to run campaigns, didn't have to worry about the way the wind was blowing, and could actually vote their conscience. Changing that was a bad idea. It was an important check against the soundbite-driven (well really headline-driven, back then) world we know today.
What I'd like to see is some kind of very tough civics test as a requirement for voting. It should be as openly and transparently administered as possible, so that anyone who wants to study and learn could pass it but very few who didn't care to study would stand a chance. In addition, anyone currently receiving some form of "entitlement" should not get to vote because what they're going to vote for is not difficult to guess and this situation is too exploitable and too dangerous for our long-term survival. The last thing I would change is that all campaigns be publically funded, each candidate gets a very generous amount, and any other "contributions" are treasonous bribery resulting in a death penalty for the candidate and 20 years in prison for the one "contributing" the money.
With something like that, we could have a nation again.
And a stoner who models their life after "Cheech & Chong" is mature? I'm sorry, but if you need mind altering substances to bring value to your life, then you must have a pretty horrid life.
I don't believe it is proper to model one's life after any stereotype or Hollywood image. I'd rather be an individual and so would anyone else who truly understands what this means. That this model in particular bothers you is irrelevant to me. To me, they are all equally abhorrent and phony when viewed as anything more than entertainment.
The hinge of your statement is "need". Mind altering substances can also be appreciated. I would say that if you need to use a Web site to bring value to your life, that's also a horrid life. Yet, someone can use and enjoy a Web site without making it the center of one's existence. You could say that about hobbies, movies, relationships, anything really; for all of those things there is an unhealthy way of being too attached to them and giving them undue importance. We call the the unhealthy ones fanboys, zealots, and codependents. We call the healthy ones people who enjoy their free time.
To treat drugs as anything unusual or special is your particular hang-up. The inability to recognize it as such that prompts you to blame others for not living as you do is a character flaw and an area in which you are emotionally immature. It is the difference between someone who simply does not belong to a religion but honors the freedom of those who do, versus someone who hates all religious people and would love to shut down every church. You merely found a form of bigotry that is less likely to be challenged than hating people of faith, people of color, people of a particular gender, etc.
So what should he have said?
This beers for you? Props for my homies while spilling out malt liquor? Dedicated his next toxic cigarette?
You can be physically addicted to both alcohol and cigarettes. No so with marijauna.
Of course... there is also the fact that alcohol and cigarettes kill vastly more people each year and are a tremendous burden on the economy with health care costs.... but you keep right at it with the baseless denigration of the poster simply because of his preference on how he relaxes and achieves an altered state.
There is no difference between the raising a glass of wine/beer and toasting this man, and raising a bowl to do the same. The sentiment is the same.
If he doesn't look down his nose at you because you ingest a substance he doesn't approve of, it will be because you listen to music he doesn't approve of or read books he wouldn't read himself. That kind of false superiority is the only kind of self-hood people like him have.
In short, he is not mature enough to be reasoned with in an adult manner.
McCarren says police dislocated her shoulder and tore her rotator cuff in the incident. Neither she nor her cameraman, Peter Hakel, was ever charged with any violations.
That's strange. I'm not a lawyer so I hope someone will correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand it, if a cop physically harms you but does not charge you with resisting arrest, he is effectively admitting he assaulted you for no reason.
At the time of the incident county officials, including County Executive Jack Johnson, said none of the cameras in the seven police cars was working.
Ever heard of a contract of adhesion? It's when a big entity like your insurance company draws up a standard contract. You have little or no ability to negotiate the wording or terms of the contract. It's a take-it-or-leave-it deal. The flip side is that any unclear or unspecified terms in that contract are automatically interpreted in your favor.
We need a concept like that for police and their "broken" dashboard cameras. If the cameras are faulty or footage is missing, it is assumed that whatever story the citizen tells is the correct one. Overnight, police departments would suddenly start doing a better job maintaining their "faulty" equipment.
The "Police" will just join the RIAA and then sue people on the angle that they recorded their performance.
Hopefully taxpayer-funded "performances" can't be restrictively copyrighted...
Can you perfectly control what everyone else says or does with information about you anywhere? This is not a Facebook problem, the solution is to find better friends.
It would normally be difficult to aggregate and analyze all of that information in a single central place. At least without a court order. Facebook is a system designed to do just that, with no court order needed since you agreed to give them permission to the data. To ignore that obvious fact means you are either being dishonest or you're performing mental gymnastics to rationalize away legitimate concerns about Facebook, no doubt to dismiss the foolishness of using it. Otherwise it would be hard to continue doing so, which you fully intend to do.
No, it's not difficult to see what's happening here and it's really transparent. You're just a different kind of fanboy and those pesky facts won't stop you. A Microsoft fanboy has to downplay the whole abuse of monopoly thing. An Apple fanboy has to downplay the disadvantages of walled gardens. You have to downplay the fact that the system is carefully designed to separate users from their privacy. That kind of selective blindness is a step towards psychosis, you know.
Further, I appreciate the way I disagree with you, therefore I must have horrible friends (and by extension be a horrible person myself), but I tire of these little childish stabs that have no place in rational discourse. Facebook's privacy settings, even with friends who use them perfectly, don't stop Facebook and its marketers from analyzing data everyone posts to Facebook. My friends have the decency and self-respect not to betray my trust, but that's no good if I am communicating with them and the medium of communication itself is untrustworthy.
In the case of using Facebook while desiring privacy, that's the situation. Thus, I don't use Facebook and neither do my friends. Isn't that so much easier than trying to perfectly control everybody else? When you don't use a system designed to violate privacy in the first place, suddenly there is no need for that.
This is a problem quite unique to Facebook and systems like Facebook (such as MySpace before it, etc). Trying to generalize it the way you are doing in order to obfuscate that fact is beneath you, or should be.