You seriously think I'm trying to claim that Scientology is more than a fraud based on bad fiction!?!? I'm not claiming that. On the contrary, I contend that Scientology is ridiculous pile of hogwash. And so is Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, the gods of Olympus, and (forgive my horrible blasphemy) Pastafarianism.
My point is not to defend Scientology. I just want to know what makes the bible less ridiculous. The fact that fish, water, and wine all existed does not make the miracles involving them any more believable.
The existence of fish does not in any way lend credibility to the statement that Jesus used his magic to multiply them, Just like the existence of planets and volcanoes lend no credibility to the story of Xenu. Both are groundless fiction proclaiming as truth events that violate the laws of physics.
You seem to be saying that Scientology is CLEARLY bunk because it flies in the face of even the most basic observable evidence. So does Genesis, and so does rising from the dead.
So I'm asking you -- not in defense of Scientology, but in defense of reason -- what makes the statement "Jesus was omnipotent and drove around in a Volkswagon" less credible than the statement "Jesus was omnipotent and could walk across the surface of liquid water?"
If the Bible told of Jesus driving around in a Volkswagen, I'd consider it bullshit as well.
Why, exactly? The bible tells of Jesus healing the sick with his touch, raising the dead, replicating bread and fish, changing water into wine, predicting the future, and rising from the grave. Is traveling in time or creating a Volkswagen beyond his omnipotent abilities? And that's just the New Testament -- in the old you get talking animals, world wide floods, giants, pillars of salt, rivers turning to blood. . . .
Why would this thing, a Volkswagen, be the final straw that makes the story ridiculous? When it comes to every other logical impossibility in the bible, God's omnipotent magic is explanation enough for you, but somehow a Volkswagen is beyond the pale -- what makes it different?
I doubt that. If they were visiting sites that were of any significance, THAT would have been the news story. The fact that no such activity is mentioned, and that the story focuses only on the fact that they used anonymous proxies, implies to me that the proxy use alone is the only offense.
If they bypassed the proxy to visit donkeyf*cking.com or howtoblowupyourschool.org, I doubt that anyone who bothered to write an article on this incident would decide to leave that detail out.
3. Many companies are posting "lower-than-average" numbers. In fact, about half of them are (that's what average means), unless you meant median, in which case exactly half of them are.
I make no assertions about the health of the economy or the truth of the statement you were addressing, as I have no numbers and no expertise on the subject. But the GP was clearly talking about an average over time, not an average among companies.
If the weather report tells me to expect below average temperatures, I don't assume they mean it will be colder in my city than in most other cities. I know that they mean it will be colder here in the coming days than it is here on most other days at this time of year.
Why not calculate what you really owe the government more closely, and put THAT extra money into savings each month as well?
Aren't you asking me what I just explained?
Look, the amount of interest I could earn on that extra money over the course of a year is peanuts. If I was inclined to do so, I could sit down and figure out exactly how much deductible mortgage interest I'd be paying over the course of the year, decide up-front how much money to give to charity, make some educated guesses about how my investments will perform, and then adjust my W-4 accordingly, and devote the difference specifically to be saved instead of spent.
But what do I get for my trouble? Enough interest after a year to finance an appetizer or two at my local T.G.I. Fridays? Hell, for the time it would take me to estimate my tax liability that carefully, I could work a couple of extra billable hours and net more money than I'd gain by doing all this fastidious number-crunching.
It's like this -- Every day when I get home and change out of my work attire, I empty my pocket change into a big jar on my nightstand. This jar is not magical in any way, and thus it is not interest-bearing. Sure, it would make more financial sense if I walked to the bank every night and deposited this pocket change into a savings account (it's down the block, so gasoline is not an issue), but I don't. I wait until the jar is full, when it's worth my time and energy to do something with it.
The situation with my tax refund differs only in that the amount involved is bigger -- in the same way that a bacterium is bigger than a quark.
That's all true, but I'd still rather get a refund every year than owe. The amount of interest that I would earn by having that money in my pocket throughout the year is not significant. In reality, it is non-existent, because (and here I'm just being honest with myself) I'd only end up pissing it away on small luxuries. The amount of extra money in my pocket each paycheck would only be enough to make me dine out more, upgrade my cable package, or buy a new ipod or something.
And then when my tax bill came at last, it would feel like a hardship.
This is because each time I get paid, I pay my mortgage and bills, transfer a fixed amount into my various savings and investment accounts, and consider whatever is left to be mine to play with.
By getting a refund at tax time, I may have missed out on the interest, but the "found" money is large enough that I won't be inclined to waste it -- I'll make a major purchase, pay off a loan, or -- now that the amount is big enough to mean something to me -- put it into an interest-bearing account or investment.
Plus, the fact that I'm getting a refund is motivation to file in February, and avoid this whole April 15th mess.
So yeah, giving the government an interest-free loan is mathematically foolish -- but when you take psychology into account it can be better than owing them.
To be fair, none of the things you've described are really "tech products." They are kids toys. Sure, they use technology, but what doesn't? I wouldn't describe my car, my toaster, or my alarm clock as tech products, even though that last one is pretty annoying.
And exactly how would you come up with those search-words? And how would being able to search google help you with actually filtering stuff? Come on, if the school IT-staff consists of one guy with minimal training (who spends half his time teaching), managing hordes of old unreliable hardware donated by companies not needing it anymore, then any task will quickly take 25% of the IT-staffs time. Besides, he already had a firewall, and had myspace blocked. He was trying to find a way to block whatever ways the students used to circumvent that. I doubt searching google for "SSL tunnel" would help much with that.
I think you missed his point. He was saying that filtering is pointless altogether, because it is easy for any student to bypass it after searching for "SSL tunnel." The IT guy isn't the one searching for "SSL tunnel" -- that wouldn't make any sense.
Do you understand the difference between discussing something and arguing for it? She discusses two issues. She argues for taxing only one of them -- the one in which someone cashes out.
I agree with the researchers' conclusions. A full conversation usually stays in the background for me. Hearing one side is very jarring and I can't ignore it.
Sure, you say that now. . . but how will you feel when instead of banning cell phone use, they mandate that everyone use the speaker-phone?;)
Personally, I have no problem with people talking on the cell phone in any public place where I should normally expect to be subject to background noise. Stores, the street, planes, whatever. Now, if you start gabbing in a movie theater, whether on a cell phone or to the other jackasses you are sitting with, you can expect me to "accidentally" spill my icee on your crotch.
Well, I'm not going to spend my afternoon chasing down an exhaustive list, but we can start with Jose Padilla (Who may well have had ties to terrorism but was certainly not captured in "combat") and Canadian Maher Arar, who was arrested by the U.S. during a stopover in New York on his way home to Canada and turned over to Syria, tortured, and later exonerated.
I'll admit that I don't even know if they bothered declaring Arar a combatant -- when you render someone to a secret foreign torture sight and nobody knows it, you don't have to designate them anything.
But all the major legal challenges to the Bush Administration's assertions about what it's powers are on this subject have been based on cases like Padilla and others, who were not captured on any battlefield, but simply arrested at an airport on "suspicion of having ties to terrorism."
Are there other cases? I'm confident I have read of others. Can I produce them on demand without a lot of web searching that I don't want to do right now? No. But there's a couple of names to start with if you feel like searching for yourself.
Agreed. If you ask me, the defense department was made to look foolish (having machines so insecure that some stoned UFO nut was able to waltz right into them), and now the feds need to save face by portraying him as a scary and highly dangerous hacker, who has used his mad skillz to compromise our national security.
That would depend on which sovereign is trying the defendant. Some states have the death penalty, others have outlawed it. The FEDERAL government does have the death penalty.
Since in this case the crime is against the Department of Defense, it would be a federal crime, under federal jurisdiction.
However, hacking is not a capital offense under any jurisdiction, so far as I am aware. When the prosecutor said he would fry, it was a figure of speech.
That being said, if I were the U.K. I sure as hell wouldn't extradite one of my citizens to a country where due process and habeas corpus have recently been ruled to not apply to "enemy combatants," a designation which is applied to non-citizens solely at the discretion of the executive branch. Under our constitutional system of justice, he would not have anything to worry about as far as the death penalty -- but since he hacked the military, and the government could ignore the constitutional system of justice by uttering the magic words. . .
The other was the Lasseter (spelling may be wrong) -- the first ever laser pistol, which was owned by the first husband of , and stolen by the crew of the Serenity.
For some reason I was never able to pull that off without corrupting the save game -- however, I was in Junior High at the time, it probably confounded me with something as simple as being in hex.:)
In the olden days (DOS) version of X-Com: UFO Defense, a save game consisted of a whole bunch of individual files in a directory tree. After some tinkering around, I realized that one particular file stored nothing except a list of what equipment you had "on order" and after how much more game time it was going to arrive.
By ordering a bunch of equipment and saving your game just before it was due to arrive (call that save game A) then saving again immediately after it arrives (call that save game B), and then copying this file from save game A to save game B, you could get whatever equipment you had ordered to arrive again. And again, and again. And you could turn around and sell all the extra stuff for cash.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat. I used to start off a game by repeating this trick until I had maxed out my cash. I found the corresponding file that allowed you to improve your tech without actually performing the research, but that was less of an advantage, since the game used your tech-level to decide how difficult the scenarios it gave you should be.
Yeah -- her running the Boston one is clearly just a nice bit of publicity for the marathon and the space program. I'm sure her time will be utterly and completely unofficial.
What she SHOULD do is start her own marathon -- the 2007 Space Marathon! She'll win because she'll be the only one in it.
Obligatory: Fine! I'll start my own marathon! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the marathon and the blackjack!
Her claim to have run a marathon holds about this much (holding finger and thumb together) weight, primarily cause she's effectively got this much (holding finger and thumb together) weight.
What are you saying? That there is no gravity in Houston? Her "claim" to have run a marathon refers to having run one last year -- on Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
You seriously think I'm trying to claim that Scientology is more than a fraud based on bad fiction!?!? I'm not claiming that. On the contrary, I contend that Scientology is ridiculous pile of hogwash. And so is Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, the gods of Olympus, and (forgive my horrible blasphemy) Pastafarianism.
My point is not to defend Scientology. I just want to know what makes the bible less ridiculous. The fact that fish, water, and wine all existed does not make the miracles involving them any more believable.
The existence of fish does not in any way lend credibility to the statement that Jesus used his magic to multiply them, Just like the existence of planets and volcanoes lend no credibility to the story of Xenu. Both are groundless fiction proclaiming as truth events that violate the laws of physics.
You seem to be saying that Scientology is CLEARLY bunk because it flies in the face of even the most basic observable evidence. So does Genesis, and so does rising from the dead.
So I'm asking you -- not in defense of Scientology, but in defense of reason -- what makes the statement "Jesus was omnipotent and drove around in a Volkswagon" less credible than the statement "Jesus was omnipotent and could walk across the surface of liquid water?"
If the Bible told of Jesus driving around in a Volkswagen, I'd consider it bullshit as well.
Why, exactly? The bible tells of Jesus healing the sick with his touch, raising the dead, replicating bread and fish, changing water into wine, predicting the future, and rising from the grave. Is traveling in time or creating a Volkswagen beyond his omnipotent abilities? And that's just the New Testament -- in the old you get talking animals, world wide floods, giants, pillars of salt, rivers turning to blood. . . .
Why would this thing, a Volkswagen, be the final straw that makes the story ridiculous? When it comes to every other logical impossibility in the bible, God's omnipotent magic is explanation enough for you, but somehow a Volkswagen is beyond the pale -- what makes it different?
Ah. You caught me. . . didn't RTFA on this one. :)
I doubt that. If they were visiting sites that were of any significance, THAT would have been the news story. The fact that no such activity is mentioned, and that the story focuses only on the fact that they used anonymous proxies, implies to me that the proxy use alone is the only offense.
If they bypassed the proxy to visit donkeyf*cking.com or howtoblowupyourschool.org, I doubt that anyone who bothered to write an article on this incident would decide to leave that detail out.
That statement would only be correct if the longer lifespan caused them to delay reproduction.
John Jackson: I say your 2 cent titanium tax goes too far!
Jack Johnson: And I say YOUR 2 cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough!
Except when the prices are this good! ;)
3. Many companies are posting "lower-than-average" numbers. In fact, about half of them are (that's what average means), unless you meant median, in which case exactly half of them are.
I make no assertions about the health of the economy or the truth of the statement you were addressing, as I have no numbers and no expertise on the subject. But the GP was clearly talking about an average over time, not an average among companies.
If the weather report tells me to expect below average temperatures, I don't assume they mean it will be colder in my city than in most other cities. I know that they mean it will be colder here in the coming days than it is here on most other days at this time of year.
Why not calculate what you really owe the government more closely, and put THAT extra money into savings each month as well?
Aren't you asking me what I just explained?
Look, the amount of interest I could earn on that extra money over the course of a year is peanuts. If I was inclined to do so, I could sit down and figure out exactly how much deductible mortgage interest I'd be paying over the course of the year, decide up-front how much money to give to charity, make some educated guesses about how my investments will perform, and then adjust my W-4 accordingly, and devote the difference specifically to be saved instead of spent.
But what do I get for my trouble? Enough interest after a year to finance an appetizer or two at my local T.G.I. Fridays? Hell, for the time it would take me to estimate my tax liability that carefully, I could work a couple of extra billable hours and net more money than I'd gain by doing all this fastidious number-crunching.
It's like this -- Every day when I get home and change out of my work attire, I empty my pocket change into a big jar on my nightstand. This jar is not magical in any way, and thus it is not interest-bearing. Sure, it would make more financial sense if I walked to the bank every night and deposited this pocket change into a savings account (it's down the block, so gasoline is not an issue), but I don't. I wait until the jar is full, when it's worth my time and energy to do something with it.
The situation with my tax refund differs only in that the amount involved is bigger -- in the same way that a bacterium is bigger than a quark.
That's all true, but I'd still rather get a refund every year than owe. The amount of interest that I would earn by having that money in my pocket throughout the year is not significant. In reality, it is non-existent, because (and here I'm just being honest with myself) I'd only end up pissing it away on small luxuries. The amount of extra money in my pocket each paycheck would only be enough to make me dine out more, upgrade my cable package, or buy a new ipod or something.
And then when my tax bill came at last, it would feel like a hardship.
This is because each time I get paid, I pay my mortgage and bills, transfer a fixed amount into my various savings and investment accounts, and consider whatever is left to be mine to play with.
By getting a refund at tax time, I may have missed out on the interest, but the "found" money is large enough that I won't be inclined to waste it -- I'll make a major purchase, pay off a loan, or -- now that the amount is big enough to mean something to me -- put it into an interest-bearing account or investment.
Plus, the fact that I'm getting a refund is motivation to file in February, and avoid this whole April 15th mess.
So yeah, giving the government an interest-free loan is mathematically foolish -- but when you take psychology into account it can be better than owing them.
To be fair, none of the things you've described are really "tech products." They are kids toys. Sure, they use technology, but what doesn't? I wouldn't describe my car, my toaster, or my alarm clock as tech products, even though that last one is pretty annoying.
And exactly how would you come up with those search-words? And how would being able to search google help you with actually filtering stuff? Come on, if the school IT-staff consists of one guy with minimal training (who spends half his time teaching), managing hordes of old unreliable hardware donated by companies not needing it anymore, then any task will quickly take 25% of the IT-staffs time. Besides, he already had a firewall, and had myspace blocked. He was trying to find a way to block whatever ways the students used to circumvent that. I doubt searching google for "SSL tunnel" would help much with that.
I think you missed his point. He was saying that filtering is pointless altogether, because it is easy for any student to bypass it after searching for "SSL tunnel." The IT guy isn't the one searching for "SSL tunnel" -- that wouldn't make any sense.
Do you understand the difference between discussing something and arguing for it? She discusses two issues. She argues for taxing only one of them -- the one in which someone cashes out.
-1 (Poor Reading Comprehension)
I agree with the researchers' conclusions. A full conversation usually stays in the background for me. Hearing one side is very jarring and I can't ignore it.
;)
Sure, you say that now. . . but how will you feel when instead of banning cell phone use, they mandate that everyone use the speaker-phone?
Personally, I have no problem with people talking on the cell phone in any public place where I should normally expect to be subject to background noise. Stores, the street, planes, whatever. Now, if you start gabbing in a movie theater, whether on a cell phone or to the other jackasses you are sitting with, you can expect me to "accidentally" spill my icee on your crotch.
Well, I'm not going to spend my afternoon chasing down an exhaustive list, but we can start with Jose Padilla (Who may well have had ties to terrorism but was certainly not captured in "combat") and Canadian Maher Arar, who was arrested by the U.S. during a stopover in New York on his way home to Canada and turned over to Syria, tortured, and later exonerated.
I'll admit that I don't even know if they bothered declaring Arar a combatant -- when you render someone to a secret foreign torture sight and nobody knows it, you don't have to designate them anything.
But all the major legal challenges to the Bush Administration's assertions about what it's powers are on this subject have been based on cases like Padilla and others, who were not captured on any battlefield, but simply arrested at an airport on "suspicion of having ties to terrorism."
Are there other cases? I'm confident I have read of others. Can I produce them on demand without a lot of web searching that I don't want to do right now? No. But there's a couple of names to start with if you feel like searching for yourself.
Agreed. If you ask me, the defense department was made to look foolish (having machines so insecure that some stoned UFO nut was able to waltz right into them), and now the feds need to save face by portraying him as a scary and highly dangerous hacker, who has used his mad skillz to compromise our national security.
Asshats, one and all.
That would depend on which sovereign is trying the defendant. Some states have the death penalty, others have outlawed it. The FEDERAL government does have the death penalty.
Since in this case the crime is against the Department of Defense, it would be a federal crime, under federal jurisdiction.
However, hacking is not a capital offense under any jurisdiction, so far as I am aware. When the prosecutor said he would fry, it was a figure of speech.
That being said, if I were the U.K. I sure as hell wouldn't extradite one of my citizens to a country where due process and habeas corpus have recently been ruled to not apply to "enemy combatants," a designation which is applied to non-citizens solely at the discretion of the executive branch. Under our constitutional system of justice, he would not have anything to worry about as far as the death penalty -- but since he hacked the military, and the government could ignore the constitutional system of justice by uttering the magic words. . .
Well, that probably wouldn't happen. Probably.
That was supposed to be "first huband of [the con-artist with a dozen names]"
Ah, never mind, never mind -- I see that I misread the Apple analogy. My bad.
And now slashdot is making me wait a few minutes before I can withdraw my idiocy. What is so bad about posting twice in rapid succession anyway?
Jumpsuits and pager-pins?
Am I missing a reference, or are you confusing Star Wars with Star Trek: The Next Generation?
The other was the Lasseter (spelling may be wrong) -- the first ever laser pistol, which was owned by the first husband of , and stolen by the crew of the Serenity.
For some reason I was never able to pull that off without corrupting the save game -- however, I was in Junior High at the time, it probably confounded me with something as simple as being in hex. :)
In the olden days (DOS) version of X-Com: UFO Defense, a save game consisted of a whole bunch of individual files in a directory tree. After some tinkering around, I realized that one particular file stored nothing except a list of what equipment you had "on order" and after how much more game time it was going to arrive.
By ordering a bunch of equipment and saving your game just before it was due to arrive (call that save game A) then saving again immediately after it arrives (call that save game B), and then copying this file from save game A to save game B, you could get whatever equipment you had ordered to arrive again. And again, and again. And you could turn around and sell all the extra stuff for cash.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat. I used to start off a game by repeating this trick until I had maxed out my cash. I found the corresponding file that allowed you to improve your tech without actually performing the research, but that was less of an advantage, since the game used your tech-level to decide how difficult the scenarios it gave you should be.
Yeah -- her running the Boston one is clearly just a nice bit of publicity for the marathon and the space program. I'm sure her time will be utterly and completely unofficial.
What she SHOULD do is start her own marathon -- the 2007 Space Marathon! She'll win because she'll be the only one in it.
Obligatory: Fine! I'll start my own marathon! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the marathon and the blackjack!
Her claim to have run a marathon holds about this much (holding finger and thumb together) weight, primarily cause she's effectively got this much (holding finger and thumb together) weight.
What are you saying? That there is no gravity in Houston? Her "claim" to have run a marathon refers to having run one last year -- on Earth.