On the other hand, the US has a huge vested interest in putting people in prison and consequently things like prison rape are so popular that it is regularly used as a joke in the most mainstream of television and film here.
People repeat what they hear. When the only people who get "air time" promote the crazy, then the crazy is the new normal. The point is that it isn't the religion that is necessarily crazy it is the people in power who use the crazy for their own agenda. See muslims who live in countries that aren't repressive, I doubt you'll find much support for stoning among them.
The only reason you get to hear about those violent radicals is because the governments of those countries have an interest in promoting those viewpoints. Most of those countries are so tightly controlled that nothing gets any sort of publicitly unless the government explicitly promotes it. Take away the totalitarians promoting those radicals for their own ends and you wouldn't hear about them any more than you hear about the radicals in other religions.
While the difference between email and a simple mouse click may just be a difference of degree and not kind, it is such a large difference in degree as to make the question of kind moot.
If you're curious, there were about 60 reported comments when I pulled up the page this afternoon (including the one I'm responding to). I've gone through half so far, and haven't downmodding any yet today.
That might work if the volume of flags never gets to the point where it gets outsourced to low-paid labor. I've seen other sites, IMDB comes to mind, where nearly any post will be deleted if someone complains about it no matter how inoccous and that's despite their own posted guidelines saying that making bogus reports may get your own account deleted.
Personally I'm fine with the crap posts taking a while to get down-modded. I normally browse at 3 and up and haven't seen a crap post at that level in probably over a decade. If anyone is so thin skinned that they can't deal with seeing the seemy underside of humanity once and a while then they should do the same.
Such extremism isn't the sole domain of the religious, and I say that as an atheist. The assholes will always find some way to legitimize their assholeness, if not religion then some other idealogy like nationalism, racism, economics, etc.
You are so clearly wrapped up in this that you can't even read what you cut-n-paste. None of what you quoted disputes my original point that Israel contributed - I never said they were solely responsible.
First quote -- this article was written in 2009 so "recent ascent" doesn't apply to what happened 30 years ago but rather their recent dominance resulting in the election win. And the second quote is a tacit admission that they did support Hamas as it starts off with "even if israel had tried to stop the islamists" suggesting that they supported rather than opposed.
I'm done. You can have the last word because I'm pretty sure that no mater what you write all it will do is demonstrate your personal lack of objectivity rather than an interest in uncovering the truth.
Yes I read the entire thing before writing my response.
Anyone without a hyper-emotional connection to the topic will notice the following points the article:
"Israel's experience echoes that of the U.S., which, during the Cold War, looked to Islamists as a useful ally against communism. Anti-Soviet forces backed by America after Moscow's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan later mutated into al Qaeda."... "The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled,
Now I fully expect you to respond that such passages don't explicitly detail direct financial transfers, but the question is pretty simple - what is the point of a making them a charity if not to permit otherwise embargoed transfers of money to them? It isn't like the people of palestine were particularly concerned with charitable deductitons on their taxes.
Do a little research next time before parroting bullshit
Sounds like you are emotionally invested in the topic.
Note that I didn't say Israel was solely responsible, everything else you wrote is true but does not contradict what I said, no matter who vociferiously you expressed it.
For anyone else reading along interrested in an actual citation, here'e one of many that acknowledges both Israel's and the Muslim Brotherhood's involvement in the beginnings of Hamas.
Since it is very common to hold a tablet with one hand, it would be interesting if someone would build a tablet with pressure senors on the back and side (for your thumb) so that the hand holding the tablet could type just be squeezing. Make the entire back of the tablet pressure sensitive so you don't have to worry about lining your fingers up, just let the software figure out which finger is which based on the relative location of each press/squeeze.
Just curious - if you do not trust them to keep their word on not using the data they collect,
I do trust them. I don't care about being marketed to. I care about how that information may end up in the wrong hands - government agencies, private investigators, stalkers, etc. Google doesn't promise anything about most of that.
Its not the techies who did it, its the marketing departments. Any audio engineer who refuses to over-compress is just going to get replaced by someone else who will.
I would never do it, but at least it starts to give people an idea of how much google values their privacy and they can then ask themselves if their privacy is really more valuable than what google is able to get out of it.
I would like to propose the reverse program - I pay google $5 month in return for never, ever being tracked at all no matter how many of their services I use. Not the typical BS of still tracking but not actually "using" the collected info, I mean the people who pay get their info logged to/dev/null instead of google's permanent databases.
If you keep adding new crap to "the system" (the tax code), you're inevitably going to add more and more loopholes,
That's a false premise. Accretion isn't the only way to improve a system. Culling is just as important.
Are you going to create a new Federal agency just to monitor everyone's stock account and send out bills every time their stock value goes up?
Arguments like that suggest you aren't interested in fixing anything, but rather simlpy in defending the status quo. Over-simplifying in order to make failure pre-ordained isn't a useful contribution to the conversation. Instead you could have proposed an option that isn't vulnerable to your over-simplified failure mode. For example - a problem identified here is the ability to borrow against unrealized gains. How about we make borrowing against unrealized gains count as realizing them under the appropriate circumstances?
...would raise hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue over the next 10 years.
No, it would mean the excessively rich exploit a different loophole instead.
That isn't a reason to give up trying to fix the system.
No system will ever be perfect but that doesn't mean we shouldn't always be working to improve it, applying lessons learned along the way. For one thing, if we don't constantly evolve it, it will rot as more and more people apply the lessons they've learned and create new ways to game the system. It isn't like all loopholes are immediately apparent and exploitable. Even the ones that are 'obvious' may still carry the risk of a court ruling making them invalid so only the people with the highest risk tolerance will try to make use of them until the whole thing has worked its way through the court system.
Every time an article related to real-life security (i.e., fighting terrorists) appears, Slashdotters come out of the woodwork to say that there have been an average of 300 US deaths in the past 10 years from terrorism, more people die from car wrecks and smoking, etc.
There is another angle - relative power. In both cases - anti-terror over-acheivements and facebook ubiquity - it is a power imbalance where we, the little guys, are more and more at the mercy of big organizations. There is no contradiction in pointing out that both scenarios disempower regular people and empower big capricious organizations.
It's probably the cookies left by the Like button that's all over the Internet now, that works even if you're not logged on (even if you don't have an account). That's why I blocked all facebook cookies on my browser along time ago.
Unless you are behind a proxy with tens of thousands of other people that's not enough - simply pulling the like button from facebook's servers associates your ip and browser "fingerprint" with the page the like button was embedded on. Look into the ghostery and/or disconnect plugins for firefox to block the loading of the button in the first place.
The only kind of person who would think that review was anything even approaching a cliff's notes version of the book are people who haven't read the book. For example saying that Hock Seng is Anderson Lake's "assistant" glosses over at least a quarter of the narrative.
since Texas is an at-will state (as in, they can fire you, at will, for any reason any time),
All states in the union are at-will. You are probably mixing up right-to-work with at-will where some states are right-to-work and others are not - right-to-work means union membership can not be made a mandatory requirement of working for a company.
Slashdot Mirror
The US.
On the other hand, the US has a huge vested interest in putting people in prison and consequently things like prison rape are so popular that it is regularly used as a joke in the most mainstream of television and film here.
People repeat what they hear. When the only people who get "air time" promote the crazy, then the crazy is the new normal. The point is that it isn't the religion that is necessarily crazy it is the people in power who use the crazy for their own agenda. See muslims who live in countries that aren't repressive, I doubt you'll find much support for stoning among them.
The only reason you get to hear about those violent radicals is because the governments of those countries have an interest in promoting those viewpoints. Most of those countries are so tightly controlled that nothing gets any sort of publicitly unless the government explicitly promotes it. Take away the totalitarians promoting those radicals for their own ends and you wouldn't hear about them any more than you hear about the radicals in other religions.
While the difference between email and a simple mouse click may just be a difference of degree and not kind, it is such a large difference in degree as to make the question of kind moot.
If you're curious, there were about 60 reported comments when I pulled up the page this afternoon (including the one I'm responding to). I've gone through half so far, and haven't downmodding any yet today.
That might work if the volume of flags never gets to the point where it gets outsourced to low-paid labor. I've seen other sites, IMDB comes to mind, where nearly any post will be deleted if someone complains about it no matter how inoccous and that's despite their own posted guidelines saying that making bogus reports may get your own account deleted.
Personally I'm fine with the crap posts taking a while to get down-modded. I normally browse at 3 and up and haven't seen a crap post at that level in probably over a decade. If anyone is so thin skinned that they can't deal with seeing the seemy underside of humanity once and a while then they should do the same.
Such extremism isn't the sole domain of the religious, and I say that as an atheist. The assholes will always find some way to legitimize their assholeness, if not religion then some other idealogy like nationalism, racism, economics, etc.
GUNs don't kill people, GNUs kill people!
You are so clearly wrapped up in this that you can't even read what you cut-n-paste. None of what you quoted disputes my original point that Israel contributed - I never said they were solely responsible.
First quote -- this article was written in 2009 so "recent ascent" doesn't apply to what happened 30 years ago but rather their recent dominance resulting in the election win. And the second quote is a tacit admission that they did support Hamas as it starts off with "even if israel had tried to stop the islamists" suggesting that they supported rather than opposed.
I'm done. You can have the last word because I'm pretty sure that no mater what you write all it will do is demonstrate your personal lack of objectivity rather than an interest in uncovering the truth.
Yes I read the entire thing before writing my response.
Anyone without a hyper-emotional connection to the topic will notice the following points the article:
"Israel's experience echoes that of the U.S., which, during the Cold War, looked to Islamists as a useful ally against communism. Anti-Soviet forces backed by America after Moscow's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan later mutated into al Qaeda." ...
"The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled,
Now I fully expect you to respond that such passages don't explicitly detail direct financial transfers, but the question is pretty simple - what is the point of a making them a charity if not to permit otherwise embargoed transfers of money to them? It isn't like the people of palestine were particularly concerned with charitable deductitons on their taxes.
Do a little research next time before parroting bullshit
Sounds like you are emotionally invested in the topic.
Note that I didn't say Israel was solely responsible, everything else you wrote is true but does not contradict what I said, no matter who vociferiously you expressed it.
For anyone else reading along interrested in an actual citation, here'e one of many that acknowledges both Israel's and the Muslim Brotherhood's involvement in the beginnings of Hamas.
Wasn't it the Government that first created it?
The US government also funded the Taliban (to fight the Russians) and the Israeli goverment funded Hamas (to fight the PLO).
Since it is very common to hold a tablet with one hand, it would be interesting if someone would build a tablet with pressure senors on the back and side (for your thumb) so that the hand holding the tablet could type just be squeezing. Make the entire back of the tablet pressure sensitive so you don't have to worry about lining your fingers up, just let the software figure out which finger is which based on the relative location of each press/squeeze.
Just curious - if you do not trust them to keep their word on not using the data they collect,
I do trust them. I don't care about being marketed to. I care about how that information may end up in the wrong hands - government agencies, private investigators, stalkers, etc. Google doesn't promise anything about most of that.
Its not the techies who did it, its the marketing departments. Any audio engineer who refuses to over-compress is just going to get replaced by someone else who will.
I would never do it, but at least it starts to give people an idea of how much google values their privacy and they can then ask themselves if their privacy is really more valuable than what google is able to get out of it.
I would like to propose the reverse program - I pay google $5 month in return for never, ever being tracked at all no matter how many of their services I use. Not the typical BS of still tracking but not actually "using" the collected info, I mean the people who pay get their info logged to /dev/null instead of google's permanent databases.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to receive a US$50.00 gift from me
FTFY
If you keep adding new crap to "the system" (the tax code), you're inevitably going to add more and more loopholes,
That's a false premise. Accretion isn't the only way to improve a system. Culling is just as important.
Are you going to create a new Federal agency just to monitor everyone's stock account and send out bills every time their stock value goes up?
Arguments like that suggest you aren't interested in fixing anything, but rather simlpy in defending the status quo. Over-simplifying in order to make failure pre-ordained isn't a useful contribution to the conversation. Instead you could have proposed an option that isn't vulnerable to your over-simplified failure mode. For example - a problem identified here is the ability to borrow against unrealized gains. How about we make borrowing against unrealized gains count as realizing them under the appropriate circumstances?
...would raise hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue over the next 10 years.
No, it would mean the excessively rich exploit a different loophole instead.
That isn't a reason to give up trying to fix the system.
No system will ever be perfect but that doesn't mean we shouldn't always be working to improve it, applying lessons learned along the way. For one thing, if we don't constantly evolve it, it will rot as more and more people apply the lessons they've learned and create new ways to game the system. It isn't like all loopholes are immediately apparent and exploitable. Even the ones that are 'obvious' may still carry the risk of a court ruling making them invalid so only the people with the highest risk tolerance will try to make use of them until the whole thing has worked its way through the court system.
I'm pretty sure Anousheh even migrated from Iran.
Plus, the X-Prize program isn't just funded by her money - there have been lots of other X-Prizes that got funding from other sources.
They just don't care.
Every time an article related to real-life security (i.e., fighting terrorists) appears, Slashdotters come out of the woodwork to say that there have been an average of 300 US deaths in the past 10 years from terrorism, more people die from car wrecks and smoking, etc.
There is another angle - relative power. In both cases - anti-terror over-acheivements and facebook ubiquity - it is a power imbalance where we, the little guys, are more and more at the mercy of big organizations. There is no contradiction in pointing out that both scenarios disempower regular people and empower big capricious organizations.
It's probably the cookies left by the Like button that's all over the Internet now, that works even if you're not logged on (even if you don't have an account). That's why I blocked all facebook cookies on my browser along time ago.
Unless you are behind a proxy with tens of thousands of other people that's not enough - simply pulling the like button from facebook's servers associates your ip and browser "fingerprint" with the page the like button was embedded on.
Look into the ghostery and/or disconnect plugins for firefox to block the loading of the button in the first place.
Smug ignorance, you are doing it right!
The only kind of person who would think that review was anything even approaching a cliff's notes version of the book are people who haven't read the book. For example saying that Hock Seng is Anderson Lake's "assistant" glosses over at least a quarter of the narrative.
since Texas is an at-will state (as in, they can fire you, at will, for any reason any time),
All states in the union are at-will. You are probably mixing up right-to-work with at-will where some states are right-to-work and others are not - right-to-work means union membership can not be made a mandatory requirement of working for a company.