...well, put mroe moderately there are things which OpenOffice.org do better than MS-Office, and these are important for me. For example, OOWriter will do HTML table configurations that MS-Word won't (and produces cleaner, more portable HTML in general); when I'm forced to use MS-Windows, it also does PDF conversions for me (I normally use Linux, and CUPS semi-automatically PDFs stuff there) for free; regardless of OS, it turns my presentations into simple Flash (SWF) files which I can then ship to people knowing that they'll work regardless of which version of MS-Office they have installed (or not); I can programamatically create rich OO documents without dragging a huge, temperamental and OS-specific collection of libraries into the question; I can automate document processing without having to be logged in with an MS-Office component on the screen full time (or even use MS-Windows at all); OOWriter is easier to teach because the menu and panel systems are more consistent than MS-Word... and so on, ad apocalipsis.
I use OSX and linux as my primary OSs and am rather dissapointed to see the lack of an aqua port. Oh well, guess i'll just have to keep running it under X.
Try some themes. It's not Aqua, but at least it doesn't look too jarringly out of place.
Surely the X11 version should be fine for 99% of Mac users? BTW, if you haven't tried OOo 1.1 yet, you're missing out on something great. Go fetch an RC now and try it out!
...especially where the PHB factor is low. I also use a lot of Mandrake myself, especially as a recommendation to others, 'coz the ease-of-use (installing, using and maintaining) is unsurpassed (well... Debian can be easier to maintain:-).
Second example: ACLU sues when gay groups are excluded from Christian-sponsored Family Day parade - like, d'oh? Would ACLU sue to include NAMBLA in such a parade? Evidently they would. What about the Christians' right to make their point? Sorry, stick to making it in church, presumably behind locked, soundproof doors lest some poor unwary Atheist be accidentally converted.
Third example: ACLU causes pulling of an AIDS brochure addressed to Christians as being inappropriate for a government department to publish. In point of fact they actively oppose many Christianity-focussed (ie the opposite way around) AIDS defenses as well, despite the measurable fact that this is the only effective defense against AIDS so far discovered. They'd rather that people died than that they becomes Christian. But I digress: is this government department unable to address the Christians in their constituency in their own language, when bringing them to an understanding of AIDS and a compassionate response toward AIDS sufferers? ACLU seems to think so. I mentions the Bible in other than a condemnatory light, so it has to go.
Fostered one, would have adopted two if two of our own had not arrived.
Lumping gays in with your argument
It's all part of the same picture, all the same brand of tangential so-called reasoning used to make a fundamentally inconsistent position (in one case, "abortion is not murder"; in the other "gay is just a different kind of normal") seem plausible or at least palatable. But did you examine the argument or just assume I was reflex gay-bashing? I have some gay friends, and worked for a rampantly gay bloke for many years. I've seen a fair bit of all sides of the issue, and am not just making hot air (or pixels).
If you make anything legal, people will use it not as one would like.
In this case it did not offer a palatable solution to the original problem either.
I agree that "Terminating a pregnancy" is not like removing a wart, I disagree that it involves killing a baby.
King Edward Memorial Hospital, about 12km south of here, has rescued babies born more than 20 weeks premature, that's less than half-way, and had those babies grow up to lead approximately normal lives. If they are babies at 20 weeks, how about at 18 weeks? 17? 16? 15? 14? What citerion do you use to decide whether it is a baby or a lump of cells? Is he or she ever just a lump of cells? Please show your working out.
Most pregnancies are not even detected for the first four weeks and many not until 8 weeks. That leaves you only a four or five week window to the end of the trimester. If you say that a first-trimester abortion is not murder, that's not much of a window. And why a trimester boundary, why not a month or six weeks earlier?
An Indonesian friend of my wife's discovered that she was pregnant two weeks before she (2 weeks prem) delivered Adam (and two days before his father was due to board a plane for Zimbabwe - which he did, he a JW / she a Catholic, fun times all around). Adam is now a happy, healthy, nearly teenage boy living in Zimbabwe with his parents. At what point was Adam not Adam? At what point back in time, if ever, would you not have been murdering Adam but just excising a growth?
I've often heard him referred to as that here in Oz. I've never met the guy personally, but his (Liberal Party, remember that party names over here are approximately the reverse of those in Yankee-land) policies seem to be missing a big dollop of what techies would regard as common sense or even basic understanding. Not that his political fellows are all angels and geniuses either. Kate Lundy (of the Labor Party, yes, spelling is correct for Oz, they are not, as has often been noted, the Labour Party) seems to have an unusually good understand of which way is up, but has her own agenda. The Democrats are such a random bunch that you can never be sure what policies the collection as a whole will emit, but there seem to be a few bright lads there, too.
I asked. The SCO Group won't even clear the BSD variants. Not that they have the right to "clear" anything since it seems they're the ones who've been stealing stuff (even the BSD stuff they included, they haven't acknowledged as per the rules. We respect IP, and the tooth fairy.
They only shipped the truly dangerous ones. You figure it out.
Still not the whole story, but you get that
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A Diest would make an acceptable Scout because they profess belief in a higher power. That's all you need.
The line between Deism and Christianity isn't anything like as sharp as you paint it. You also don't seem to understand Progressive Creationism, which is different from Young-Earth Creationism. Many PC followers believe that the development we read into the fossil record was part of the original programming, whereas a YEC follower almost inevitably regards his/her diety as vitally involved from then 'till now inclusive.
Yes, a lot of the Founding Fathers weren't Christians as we would understand the term today, yet behaved as if they were (which is not a consequence one would derive from specific Diesm), you might call them cultural Christians. Several of the statements used to make dyed-in-the-wool specific Diests out of them is taken out of context and otherwise hyped, but there's no doubt that the detail of their views were eccentirc even by the standards of the day.
Abortions weren't uncommon when they were illegal, just dangerous and of course illicit.
They were a damn sight less common than they are now. And a better solution would have been to tell mothers what they were really doing, instead of pretending that your were "only killing a baby fish" or some such nonsense, often and pointedly. Then if they still want to commit murder for their own convenience, let them do it illicitly. If they don't want to raise the child, adopt it out: there's no shortage of foster families. Abortion was supposedly legalised mainly to cover rape victims and the like, but IRL it's generally not used that way.
The other point here is that abortion wasn't as common as you seem to believe. Along similar lines, the gay lobby tried to justify itself using the "everybody's doing it" non-sequitur and claiming 10% of the population (the real figure is closer to 1%), and I don't see any difference here. So what if "everyone's" doing it. If every tenth household in your neighbourhood scatters broken bottles across its front yard, does that mean you should too? Of course not. Yet scattering broken glass across your lawn may be protected by freedom of expression.
If it pleases some blokes to play pork-swordfighting or measure each other's sumps in private, that's their business, although I wouldn't recommend it and would be offended if they recommended thay my children tried it. But pregnancy is not such a choice. "Terminating a pregnancy" is not like getting a wart removed, it involves killing a baby - a little person who depends on but is not a part of his or her mother.
I don't want to legislate morality any more than is necessary, but I can and do want to legislate damage control.
"We have no problems with Sun and HP with regards to infringement as both have honored the conditions of their Unix license contracts and operated within these," [D'Ohl] said.
Solaris probably has// Made by Scott McNealy in it somewhere but since Sun bled enough licencing money, TSG is prepared to overlook that.
As for hp, since they're pulling out of the SCOFork'em conferences, this is probably brown-nosing. Any, er, port in a storm. TSG must be starting to feel a bit lonely by now.
Re:True. But that's not the whole story.
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Joining the ACLU?
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Theist is indeed a better fit, thank you.
Dictionary.com says: "The belief, based solely on reason, in a God who created the universe and then abandoned it, assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena, and giving no supernatural revelation." That sounds pretty much like Scouts, insisting on a Diety but not doing anything useful with the concept after that.
The Deist page you referred to consisted almost entirely of logical tilting at strawmen. I'm not sure what to make of it, but "sense" doesn't seem to be one of the viable options.
A Progressive Creationist is so close to Deist that most people wouldn't be able to pick the difference, an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question, yet Progressive Creationists call themselves and are widely acknowledged as Christians. Even the cruel-to-scarecrows Diests you referred to would satisfy the requirements of the Scouts.
The intermediate friend knew the lady directly. No newspaper. Wave the bullshit flag all you like, the bloke in between does not lie or amplify. If you can't take my word for it, that's just tough.
Firstly, they don't support Christian groups whose freedom of speech is being impinged up. Interesting exception, that.
Secondly, they litigate against (as here) groups that are using their freedom of speech to incite criminal acts. I don't mind the ACLU doing that at all, but it's the pinnacle of hypocrisy for them to also defend other groups who use their own freedom of speech to incite criminal acts.
True. But that's not the whole story.
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Joining the ACLU?
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· Score: 1
The Boy Scouts are a religious organization if they can expel members for being atheists.
Absolutely true. Either the Scouts have Deist overtones or Darrell Lambert can continue to be a member.
However, the ACLU will not defend the religious rights of Christians.
Case in point, a Christian woman (FOAF) put an advert in her local newspaper for a Christian housekeeper. The ACLU immediately took her to court over it. During the weeks between that and the hearing date, the woman ran an advert for a Buddhist housekeeper alongside the Christian one. When asked in court why the ACLU had not sued over the Buddhist ad, their lawyer refused to answer and the case was dropped - appropriately enough, it was dropped "with prejudice", meaning that the ACLU had to pay her costs as well.
Why that singular exception?
It seems to me that the honesty demands that the ACLU seeks religious status for itself as well.
The US Constitution is about *individual* rights
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Joining the ACLU?
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The ACLU says that the second amendment does not apply to individuals, but to state militia.
In this case, the ACLU is clearly spouting nonsense. The Constitution speaks only to individuals, not states, so why force this one Amendment to do otherwise? You might stop to ask why the ACLU wants to warp the interpretation like this.
ACLU apply their standards *very* unevenly
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Joining the ACLU?
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They also take particular philosophical stances based on particular assumptions which are easy to prove wrong, and are clearly derived from a religious bias.
The classic example is the "right" to abort, which the ACLU promote. If you kill a baby after (s)he is born, it's murder. A week before (s)he is born, it's not. Why not? If (s)he were born 20 weeks premature, killing him/her a week later (ie, 18 weeks earlier than if (s)he'd been aborted a week before term) is also unquestionably murder. Ridiculous, isn't it?
So who will speak for those who have no voice? "We do," claim the ACLU: but here they do not speak for the baby, or the baby's rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" at all. Liars!
The only reasoning which could lead one to believe that a change of location (from inside a uterus to inside a nappy) includes a change of status from non-human "bunch of cells" to full humanity is a religious one. It calls itself Atheism but it isn't even that. The only liberty it defends is of those like themselves to believe and act as they do.
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...well, put mroe moderately there are things which OpenOffice.org do better than MS-Office, and these are important for me. For example, OOWriter will do HTML table configurations that MS-Word won't (and produces cleaner, more portable HTML in general); when I'm forced to use MS-Windows, it also does PDF conversions for me (I normally use Linux, and CUPS semi-automatically PDFs stuff there) for free; regardless of OS, it turns my presentations into simple Flash (SWF) files which I can then ship to people knowing that they'll work regardless of which version of MS-Office they have installed (or not); I can programamatically create rich OO documents without dragging a huge, temperamental and OS-specific collection of libraries into the question; I can automate document processing without having to be logged in with an MS-Office component on the screen full time (or even use MS-Windows at all); OOWriter is easier to teach because the menu and panel systems are more consistent than MS-Word... and so on, ad apocalipsis.
Try some themes. It's not Aqua, but at least it doesn't look too jarringly out of place.
Surely the X11 version should be fine for 99% of Mac users? BTW, if you haven't tried OOo 1.1 yet, you're missing out on something great. Go fetch an RC now and try it out!
...especially where the PHB factor is low. I also use a lot of Mandrake myself, especially as a recommendation to others, 'coz the ease-of-use (installing, using and maintaining) is unsurpassed (well... Debian can be easier to maintain :-).
Is this true of Lincoln, Gandhi, Bonaparte, Hitler, da Vinci, Jesus?
...else the States can rape your cat, nail your money to the door and steal your wife (or something like that) with impunity.
Second example: ACLU sues when gay groups are excluded from Christian-sponsored Family Day parade - like, d'oh? Would ACLU sue to include NAMBLA in such a parade? Evidently they would. What about the Christians' right to make their point? Sorry, stick to making it in church, presumably behind locked, soundproof doors lest some poor unwary Atheist be accidentally converted.
Third example: ACLU causes pulling of an AIDS brochure addressed to Christians as being inappropriate for a government department to publish. In point of fact they actively oppose many Christianity-focussed (ie the opposite way around) AIDS defenses as well, despite the measurable fact that this is the only effective defense against AIDS so far discovered. They'd rather that people died than that they becomes Christian. But I digress: is this government department unable to address the Christians in their constituency in their own language, when bringing them to an understanding of AIDS and a compassionate response toward AIDS sufferers? ACLU seems to think so. I mentions the Bible in other than a condemnatory light, so it has to go.
Over to Leader U for a bigger dose.
Fostered one, would have adopted two if two of our own had not arrived.
It's all part of the same picture, all the same brand of tangential so-called reasoning used to make a fundamentally inconsistent position (in one case, "abortion is not murder"; in the other "gay is just a different kind of normal") seem plausible or at least palatable. But did you examine the argument or just assume I was reflex gay-bashing? I have some gay friends, and worked for a rampantly gay bloke for many years. I've seen a fair bit of all sides of the issue, and am not just making hot air (or pixels).
In this case it did not offer a palatable solution to the original problem either.
King Edward Memorial Hospital, about 12km south of here, has rescued babies born more than 20 weeks premature, that's less than half-way, and had those babies grow up to lead approximately normal lives. If they are babies at 20 weeks, how about at 18 weeks? 17? 16? 15? 14? What citerion do you use to decide whether it is a baby or a lump of cells? Is he or she ever just a lump of cells? Please show your working out.
Most pregnancies are not even detected for the first four weeks and many not until 8 weeks. That leaves you only a four or five week window to the end of the trimester. If you say that a first-trimester abortion is not murder, that's not much of a window. And why a trimester boundary, why not a month or six weeks earlier?
An Indonesian friend of my wife's discovered that she was pregnant two weeks before she (2 weeks prem) delivered Adam (and two days before his father was due to board a plane for Zimbabwe - which he did, he a JW / she a Catholic, fun times all around). Adam is now a happy, healthy, nearly teenage boy living in Zimbabwe with his parents. At what point was Adam not Adam? At what point back in time, if ever, would you not have been murdering Adam but just excising a growth?
I've often heard him referred to as that here in Oz. I've never met the guy personally, but his (Liberal Party, remember that party names over here are approximately the reverse of those in Yankee-land) policies seem to be missing a big dollop of what techies would regard as common sense or even basic understanding. Not that his political fellows are all angels and geniuses either. Kate Lundy (of the Labor Party, yes, spelling is correct for Oz, they are not, as has often been noted, the Labour Party) seems to have an unusually good understand of which way is up, but has her own agenda. The Democrats are such a random bunch that you can never be sure what policies the collection as a whole will emit, but there seem to be a few bright lads there, too.
...IBM are well on their way to so doing, and of course Heise is doing their bit and LWN is documenting the process.
"SCO development: right on target" (-:
I asked. The SCO Group won't even clear the BSD variants. Not that they have the right to "clear" anything since it seems they're the ones who've been stealing stuff (even the BSD stuff they included, they haven't acknowledged as per the rules. We respect IP, and the tooth fairy.
They only shipped the truly dangerous ones. You figure it out.
The line between Deism and Christianity isn't anything like as sharp as you paint it. You also don't seem to understand Progressive Creationism, which is different from Young-Earth Creationism. Many PC followers believe that the development we read into the fossil record was part of the original programming, whereas a YEC follower almost inevitably regards his/her diety as vitally involved from then 'till now inclusive.
Yes, a lot of the Founding Fathers weren't Christians as we would understand the term today, yet behaved as if they were (which is not a consequence one would derive from specific Diesm), you might call them cultural Christians. Several of the statements used to make dyed-in-the-wool specific Diests out of them is taken out of context and otherwise hyped, but there's no doubt that the detail of their views were eccentirc even by the standards of the day.
...but those factors still don't make the ACLU even-handed.
They were a damn sight less common than they are now. And a better solution would have been to tell mothers what they were really doing, instead of pretending that your were "only killing a baby fish" or some such nonsense, often and pointedly. Then if they still want to commit murder for their own convenience, let them do it illicitly. If they don't want to raise the child, adopt it out: there's no shortage of foster families. Abortion was supposedly legalised mainly to cover rape victims and the like, but IRL it's generally not used that way.
The other point here is that abortion wasn't as common as you seem to believe. Along similar lines, the gay lobby tried to justify itself using the "everybody's doing it" non-sequitur and claiming 10% of the population (the real figure is closer to 1%), and I don't see any difference here. So what if "everyone's" doing it. If every tenth household in your neighbourhood scatters broken bottles across its front yard, does that mean you should too? Of course not. Yet scattering broken glass across your lawn may be protected by freedom of expression.
If it pleases some blokes to play pork-swordfighting or measure each other's sumps in private, that's their business, although I wouldn't recommend it and would be offended if they recommended thay my children tried it. But pregnancy is not such a choice. "Terminating a pregnancy" is not like getting a wart removed, it involves killing a baby - a little person who depends on but is not a part of his or her mother.
I don't want to legislate morality any more than is necessary, but I can and do want to legislate damage control.
Solaris probably has // Made by Scott McNealy in it somewhere but since Sun bled enough licencing money, TSG is prepared to overlook that.
As for hp, since they're pulling out of the SCOFork'em conferences, this is probably brown-nosing. Any, er, port in a storm. TSG must be starting to feel a bit lonely by now.
Theist is indeed a better fit, thank you.
Dictionary.com says: "The belief, based solely on reason, in a God who created the universe and then abandoned it, assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena, and giving no supernatural revelation." That sounds pretty much like Scouts, insisting on a Diety but not doing anything useful with the concept after that.
The Deist page you referred to consisted almost entirely of logical tilting at strawmen. I'm not sure what to make of it, but "sense" doesn't seem to be one of the viable options.
A Progressive Creationist is so close to Deist that most people wouldn't be able to pick the difference, an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question, yet Progressive Creationists call themselves and are widely acknowledged as Christians. Even the cruel-to-scarecrows Diests you referred to would satisfy the requirements of the Scouts.
The intermediate friend knew the lady directly. No newspaper. Wave the bullshit flag all you like, the bloke in between does not lie or amplify. If you can't take my word for it, that's just tough.
Secondly, they litigate against (as here) groups that are using their freedom of speech to incite criminal acts. I don't mind the ACLU doing that at all, but it's the pinnacle of hypocrisy for them to also defend other groups who use their own freedom of speech to incite criminal acts.
Absolutely true. Either the Scouts have Deist overtones or Darrell Lambert can continue to be a member.
However, the ACLU will not defend the religious rights of Christians.
Case in point, a Christian woman (FOAF) put an advert in her local newspaper for a Christian housekeeper. The ACLU immediately took her to court over it. During the weeks between that and the hearing date, the woman ran an advert for a Buddhist housekeeper alongside the Christian one. When asked in court why the ACLU had not sued over the Buddhist ad, their lawyer refused to answer and the case was dropped - appropriately enough, it was dropped "with prejudice", meaning that the ACLU had to pay her costs as well.
Why that singular exception?
It seems to me that the honesty demands that the ACLU seeks religious status for itself as well.
In this case, the ACLU is clearly spouting nonsense. The Constitution speaks only to individuals, not states, so why force this one Amendment to do otherwise? You might stop to ask why the ACLU wants to warp the interpretation like this.
The classic example is the "right" to abort, which the ACLU promote. If you kill a baby after (s)he is born, it's murder. A week before (s)he is born, it's not. Why not? If (s)he were born 20 weeks premature, killing him/her a week later (ie, 18 weeks earlier than if (s)he'd been aborted a week before term) is also unquestionably murder. Ridiculous, isn't it?
So who will speak for those who have no voice? "We do," claim the ACLU: but here they do not speak for the baby, or the baby's rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" at all. Liars!
The only reasoning which could lead one to believe that a change of location (from inside a uterus to inside a nappy) includes a change of status from non-human "bunch of cells" to full humanity is a religious one. It calls itself Atheism but it isn't even that. The only liberty it defends is of those like themselves to believe and act as they do.
I see you've found a use for all of those otherwise wasted hours between midnight and dawn.