And before you blame them for following stupid orders blindly, the people who are truly at fault are the US citizens for willfully putting such incompetence in charge of such a powerful weapon.
Ya, look at the results:
- Taliban out of power in Afghanistan, Democracy taking root, country rebuilding, NATO in action, girls in school, Al Qaeda training camps destroyed - Saddam out of power in Iraq and waiting for trial, no more mass graves being filled yearly, country is rebuilding, Democracy taking root, Islamists desperate and failing - Libya sees firm action in Iraq and hands over WMD program to US/Europe and seeks rapprochement - Lebanese see Iraqi vote, kick out Syrians, work on reforms - Dear Leader in N. Korea goes into hiding when Saddam bombed, emerges to grudgingly take part in 6 country talks to resolve nuclear crisis
Yow! Can you imagine how much better off everyone would be if we had elected a President who was too smart to get involved in those messes and left sleeping dictators lie?
I guess we should learn our lesson about that whole "democracy" thing in the US.
Ghandi wasn't trying to use pacifism defend a free people against invaders coming to enslave them. Ghandi was trying to free a people ruled by a small elite from a diminishing empire which possessed a basic decency. The Nazi Reich or Imperial Japan would have freely killed him and anyone who tried to resist, or failed to obey for that matter. Firing squads and gas chambers eliminated millions of non-violent resisters to Nazi evil. Ghandi must have recognized this himself despite the advice he had for the Jewish people as noted in The Ghandi Nobody Knows:
I feel all Jews sitting emotionally at the movie 'Gandhi' should be apprised of the advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicide. If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers' knives and throw themselves into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public opinion, Gandhi was convinced, and their moral triumph would be remembered for "ages to come." If they would only pray for Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they would leave a "rich heritage to mankind." Although Gandhi had known Jews from his earliest days in South Africa--where his three staunchest white supporters were Jews, every one--he disapproved of how rarely they loved their enemies. And he never repented of his recommendation of collective suicide. Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told Louis Fischer, one of his biographers, that the Jews died anyway, didn't they? They might as well have died significantly.
If you think Ghandi was a true pacifist, you should try reading up on the activities of Sergeant Major Ghandi in the Boer War. Follow that up with his views on Kashmir, and other matters involved in obtaining Indian independence. Here is a link or two, OK, three to get you going.
Yes, but should the government be forcing this "option." If it's an option that consumers want, then it can be offered as a service. That's how the free market works, you choose your service provider based on quality, price, and offerings.
Or, as another option, the "consumers" can vote and even lobby their representatives in government to regulate markets. That is how democracy works.
I think that your silence is best attributed to a proverb:
Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding. - Proverbs 17:28
Evidence is persuasive, fanciful claims of political gnosis aren't. The truth of the matter is that you couldn't "salvage" anything even if you wanted to since both the condition that you think requires "salvage" and the understanding you claim are both your private fancy without connection to the actual events or things of this world. Your ideas and claims are void.
After three years of work, in August 1998, the first chips came back from IBM Corp., which had signed on as manufacturer. To check out the performance of the chips, the Transmeta engineers ran several benchmarks, both for Unix and Windows. The chips ran Unix benchmarks as fast as had been expected; the first magic trick had worked.
But when the engineers assigned to performance analysis started testing Windows benchmarks, they had a nasty surprise. The Windows benchmarks reported scores far lower than expected. Transmeta had reached into its magic hat to pull out a rabbit and had instead come up with a turtle.
"It was like in the Apollo 13 movie," Laird said, "We wanted to say, 'Whoops, Houston, we've got a problem here.' "
Laird was philosophical about the situation. "We're engineers," he told Spectrum. "We didn't need to panic. We needed to understand what was going on. And so we analyzed it, moved teams of hardware and software people onto it, and started fixing it."
But not all the engineers at Transmeta were so sanguine.
"We had been riding high, blindly expecting the chips to do everything that we had promised," recalled Klayman. "When they didn't, it was a real morale killer." Some of them felt it was never going to work, and since nobody was motivated, no work was getting done. Then Doug Laird told them to drop everything else they were doing, as there was still a chance to right the ship.
The company held an all-hands meeting, in which Laird told everyone the truth--that they had run into a wall running Windows benchmarks. But he reassured them that, by working together, they could fix the problem. Murray Goldman, a member of the board of directors, pledged that the board would stand by their efforts, implying that more money would be raised, should it be needed.
Looking back, Laird said a problem might have been expected with Windows95 applications. "Most of us came from a Unix background, we knew how Unix applications behaved. But we didn't really understand Windows95," he said.
Apparently Windows95 still had a lot of old 16-bit code in it, whereas Unix (as well as Windows NT) used a flat memory model with pure 32-bit code. Supporting 16-bit code was something that Transmeta had decided to offload into software.
Once they realized this, they redesigned the hardware to give better support to Windows95 applications. They also increased the size of the caches because Windows95 applications tend to use more memory than Unix applications.
The redesign process added about a year to Transmeta's development time. In fact, getting products to market took longer than any of the founders had anticipated. "If we had had a better idea of how long it would have taken, we probably would not have done it, I suspect," said D'Souza.
Transmeta had to eat another year of hardware engineering time and costs, chip fab costs, and lost market opportunity. If the first chip had worked as planned, then they might have had a real shot at setting the world on fire with their technology. As it was, the rest of the market had a chance to catch up. All because of the way Windows, in its own evil way,... works?
It is the reputation of the CCCP and the US that are the same now-the US has by poorly thought, poorly planned, poorly executed operations throughout the latter half of the cold war and lowered its reputation to that held before the first world war of a nation with wasted potential.
Tell it to the people of Eastern Europe who no longer toil under the Soviet yoke but instead are building new economies and new democracies. Tell it to the people of Ukraine, who so recently took another major step toward freedom.
That was the reputation of the CCCP since Stalin and the Bolsheviks took power and is now as described the reputation of the US and has been for the greater part of the past 30 years.
Since '75? Hardly. Well, maybe while Jimmy Carter was President, but not since Reagan took ofice. The US is quite vital and successful, thank you.
You seem to be caught up in wishful thinking. (Or maybe you are just badly informed.)
Yeah, Russia had absolutely nothing to do with that.
No, the Soviet Union (not Russia) had something to do with it, but it is quite likely that the war would have gone in a different direction without the US. The US helped to keep the UK in the war and split the German forces which kept about 60 divisions, including some of their best, in the West. The US also poured massive amounts of food and material into the USSR including that vital commodity of modern warfare, the truck. I doubt that even the Soviets would have held out against Germany fighting a single front war against the USSR, especially if the USSR couldn't get the massive amounts of supplies from the US and UK.
I know nobody here will admit it, but we are the same.
Not admit it? I specifically reject it. Your attempt to portray the US and USSR as the same is a farce. Stalin killed at least as many Soviet citizens than the Nazis. How many tens of millions of Americans did Roosevelt round up and kill? (Hint: 0) And could you point out where the US did to a country in Western Europe the equivalent of what the USSR did to the liberalization movements or uprisings in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany?
e.g. dropping tonnes of bombs and chemicals on Viet Nam was a very eloquent way to say "fuck off and die", meanwhile "stated goals" of freedom and democracy were for American domestic consumption.
The dropping of bombs and use of chemicals in Viet Nam was a pretty direct way to tell the North Viet Namese Army which was in the process of invading South Viet Nam to "fuck off and die". It was pretty successful too as North Viet Nam ultimately signed a peace treaty. Unfortunately they violated the treaty as soon as the US withdrew, invaded and captured South Viet Nam. As imperfect as the South was as a country, it took the conquest of the South by the North to drive huge numbers of Viet Namese to become "boat people". I guess the South was a victim of "domestic consumption" of the North, eh?
In some ways it's worse than a dictatorship, if you think about it. Most people in nasty dictatorships have an all-to-clear a picture of exactly what kind of behaviors will get them 'disappeared.'
I can understand your problem. Apparently you, like about 15% of Americans, have a problem distinguishing what could be considered good versus bad in regard to the war against Al Qaeda and its associates. I've prepared a short guide to help you past these difficulties.
Good Buying pie to take to church picknic Bad Putting arsenic into pie at church picnic to impress Osama
Good Taking pictures of statue of Liberty to remember trip and show neighbors Bad Taking picutres of Statue of Liberty to plan where to put bombs with rest of your cell
Good Using web mail to keep in touch with Grandma Bad Using web mail to check if today is the day you strap on bombs for Martyrdom
Good Attending City Council meeting to speak up about bad roads Bad Assassinating City Council
Good Donating money to the Girl Scouts Bad Acting as front man for fake Islamic charity funneling money to Al Qaeda
Good Buying everyone a round of drinks Bad Shooting everyone in the bar
Good Sight-seeing Japan Bad Taking secret training in Pakistan to make war on Western infidels
Good Having a pen pal with whom you trade cultural and person observations for world peace Bad Collecting secret information to make the next hijacking easier
Good Having a job to pay your bills Bad Taking a job to get closer to a target for the next bombing attack
Good Attending a meeting to plan a demonstration (in favor of | against) American policy Bad Meeting with the rest of the cell to plan how to block escape routes so more infidels die
Good Offering to take in a former convict from a half-way house to make a new life Bad Using your home as a "safe house" to hide an ambush squad in route to their mission
Now, this might be a lot of deail, so you can boil it down to a fairly simple heuristic: If the activity contributes to violent attacks against America or Americans, it is almost certain to be a bad thing under the anti-terrorists laws.
When Christian fundamentalists hear that humans are animals descended from apes, they think they hear that humans are "just animals". Right and wrong don't apply to animals. They fear that the only basis they can imagine for morality is being destroyed.
I don't think that you've quite captured the issue, at least as I see it. The Bible teaches that God exists and created mankind in a special act of creation. Evolution attacks that position by saying that man arose by a purely natural process, no God required. In essence, evolution practically attacks the idea of God, the special creation of man, and the special nature of man. (Man made in God's image.) Now, you can still have moral codes without God, that is obvious. What you have a much more difficult time doing, if you can do it at all, is to arrive at a univeral moral law external to us. If there is no God, why should I consider your moral code better than mine, or Bob's? Your code may say men should be angels, but mine says nothing is forbidden to me. If there is no established moral order to the uinverse, no God, how do you choose? Force? Vote? Luck of the draw? First call? City rules? It is really moral chaos. There are also some basic questions about the nature of man that come out of the issue as well. The traditional Christian view is that mankind is born with a corrupted nature that is drawn to do wrong, a sin nature, that only God can remedy. Many other religions or philosophies belive that man is basically good at heart without that corruption.
As to your view that, "You can't reason with creationists because reason doesn't work against fear" is silly. Being a creationist doesn't make you insane, irrational, or stupid. (I know that chair of a Physics department who is a creationist, last I knew.) It does mean that you approach the universe, or dare I say, creation, with a very different set of assumptions about life, the universe, and everything. Some of those assumptions will have little to no impact on day to day life, others will have a profound influence.
The correct way (if this was science and not religion) would be to look for something that CONTRADICTED the hypothesis that it is impossible for complex systems to evolve.
Not at all. It is entirely proper scientifically to try to falsify the hypothesis that complex systems can evolve, even if it seems certain that they did. How do you think that the current theories about punctuated equilibria evol... er.. developed? Rechecking previous work happens regularly in science. That is how mistakes are found, ironed out, and theories strengthened. Newton's theories seemed pretty tight until those cracks started showing. Admittedly it will grow tiresome to some, but if there is a genuine problem found it should be looked at. The work of the creationists and ID advocates will only serve to either improve current natural selection / evolutionary theory, or help replace it with something better, even if it causes considerable consternation in the process.
...Seriously guys. The joke's over. OVER. We're all getting very, very afraid of you. I'm starting to be a lot more comfortable with the notion that China and India may soon be superpowers. I'm actually *glad* Russia still has a massive arsenal of nukes: Putin may be a dictator-by-proxy, but AT LEAST HE'S NOT INSANE........And if you're not a religious nutcase but you are in the U.S., don't fucking apologise. DO SOMETHING. You are to blame for letting these rabid fundamentalists take over. YOU have to stop them.
Ok, I'll now be modded into oblivion, but I feel slightly better.
####THIS POST BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE WONDERS OF SCIENCE####
The United States has been both a leader in science and industry in the world as well as a nation of strong religious faith for a very long time. The Harvard MBA - fighter pilot President of the United States who announced the goal of the United States to go to Mars might just have a clue or two that eludes you.
However, you do raise some points worth discussing. Bringing the burning light of reason to the Christian world is, no doubt, long overdue in some people's minds. The question is, who will do it? The French secularists who perpetrated Revolutionary terror? Perhaps the pagans of Nazi Germany or ancient Rome? (Yes, pagans. Look it up.) How about the atheists of the Soviet Union, North Korea, and the rest of the Communist block with their harsh repression of religion and agitation for atheism? Or perhaps the modern Europeans can show the United States the way, that is if they hurry before their imploding native populations (why is that?) and high immigration rates turn Europe into an Islamic continent in about 50 years. With all of the wrongs that you attribute to Christianity in the United States, shouldn't you be more concerned about paganism and atheism in Europe and Asia, particularly given the massive body count they created, often in their own country? (1-200,000,000) Or is it Christianity that scares you more than massive body counts?
Frankly you come off as less of an advocate for science than as simply anti-religious, perhaps to the point of mania. The two aren't the same.
lynchin a group of oppressors is not, imho, a bad thing.
Extrajudicial lynching is a bad thing, a very bad thing. That is the way of lawlessness. When society devolves into lawlessness, everybody suffers. If, on the other hand, said individuals committed a crime, are tried, found guilty and executed, then OK.
Imagine if someone went out and lynched a few nazi's back in the day - would you cry for them?
That would have been a war crime. See the answer above. It is a bad thing.
Imagine if someone lynched a few KKK members, would you cry for them?
Still a crime. See previous answers.
Hurting a group who likes to oppress people is not the same thing the group does.
It is exactly the same as what they are doing. You just disagree with what constitutes grounds to commit the same outrage, to take the law into your own hands.
The group is oppressing people for nonsensical reasons - my desire to oppress them is because they are hurting innocents - thusly not being innocents themselves.
And by going outside the law you are no longer innocent yourself. Your impulse is to travel down a very dangerous, destructive road.
It is most likely to be after enough people who take your views seriously get just enough power to rule the majority by some combination of force, guile, and perverted law.
(Maybe the "funny" moderation should be changed to "ha ha funny" so nobody gets confused.)
Anti-discrimination laws make no mention of a preferred class of people.
Allow me to quibble and say "protected," not "preferred."
They're written in a completely neutral way and apply equally to all, e.g. "it is illegal to fire someone on the basis of their race, gender, or sexual orientation"--not "it is illegal to fire someone for being black, female, or gay."
It all depends on the enforcement, doesn't it? It almost doesn't matter much what happens to you if you are a straight white male, your chance of getting legal relief for a real injustice of any magnitude is vanishingly small, except for maybe age discrimination, but even that is dicey. You would probably come out ahead standing out in a thunderstorm and trying to be hit by lightning to collect the insurance money. On the other hand, most employers would be terrified of firing a black lesbian who was looting the company treasury unless they had video, a sting, a long paper trail, the blessing of the corporate attorney, DA, and the blessing of an oracle.
Playing the race/gay/gender card isn't popular "just because," it is popular because it is effective.
Other then that, a good lynchin of bastards who want to take away the rights of others because they are different (and pose no real threat to anyone else) wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Oh the irony.
Well, what's a little extrajudicial terror against unpopular groups? Anyone for the formation of the GayGayGay*?
I don't really see an anti-discrimination law as "special rights".
Sure it is. Anti-discrimination laws elevate specific classes of persons or their attributes to a protected status. That is, by definition, a "special right." That can happen either directly in the law itself, or in the customary manner of enforcement. Once that protection is in place, it can be used as a bludgeon to beat down or punish anyone whose views do not agree with those of a protected person. "You don't cheer and advocate my relationship? That is bigotry! Discrimination! Hostile environment! Sue sue sue!" There are plenty of other cans of worms that can be opened as well. And please don't say that won't happen.
As the China and Indian get wealthier they wont give a fucking shit about the US and UK getting poorer, just like we didnt give a shit about them living in poverty and squalor while we enjoyed our spin on the affluence merry go round.
I take it that the whole Chinese-Maoist-Communist "kill 35,000,000+ of our own people while destroying the economy by collectivization and cultural revolution" thing slipped by you, right? But hey, what's a little mega-murder and communist "economics" among friends? Cough. Cough. cannibalism?
LOL. Sorry junior, I don't work out of Mom's basement. When something works well enough, we use it until we need to replace it. Better eye candy isn't really a good enough reason to upgrade our systems which are older than I care for, but aren't that old. Thanks for the laugh though. (Do you think you would be willing to underwrite the port to new hardware for some of our apps? Some of them only run on 1 or 2 microprocessor families, X86 isn't one of them.)
Such as?
Excessive memory footprint? Excessive CPU use? Those get to be a drag on systems with 20 people on them. Well, actually it can also be inconvenient on a workstation with only 1 person on a graphical console and several others working remotely.
.... Thats what I thought.
No you didn't.
How is GNOME not functional?
Gnome is functional, but so is CDE, and that is the point. CDE is functional enough with lower overhead, better behavior, and fewer bugs.
Its integration with GNOME apps is far beyond anything CDE provides.
It provides pleny of things we don't gneed or care about while consuming more resources. No win there.
At least before Sun goes under, and it becomes a drain on Linux developers.
Like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, etc., are "drains" on "Linux developers"?
Actually it is more like the reverse. Sun has underwritten the NFS v4 implementation that is in the Linux 2.6 kernel, as well donated large amounts of code that help make Linux stronger, like Open Office, Internationalization code for X, etc. If it wasn't for Sun, Linux would be weaker. A large amount of useful code in Linux today is only there due to the charity of large companies like Sun, IBM, SGI, etc..
Sorry, but that is more of a hardware issue than a software issue, at least up to 32 CPUs. There aren't many PCs/Windows boxes made that take more than 8 CPUs. Unisys is one of the few (only?) manufacturers that make them.
I will also point out that there are a lot of Linux based datacenters that look exactly like your description of a Windows datacenter.
Slashdot Mirror
And before you blame them for following stupid orders blindly, the people who are truly at fault are the US citizens for willfully putting such incompetence in charge of such a powerful weapon.
Ya, look at the results:
- Taliban out of power in Afghanistan, Democracy taking root, country rebuilding, NATO in action, girls in school, Al Qaeda training camps destroyed
- Saddam out of power in Iraq and waiting for trial, no more mass graves being filled yearly, country is rebuilding, Democracy taking root, Islamists desperate and failing
- Libya sees firm action in Iraq and hands over WMD program to US/Europe and seeks rapprochement
- Lebanese see Iraqi vote, kick out Syrians, work on reforms
- Dear Leader in N. Korea goes into hiding when Saddam bombed, emerges to grudgingly take part in 6 country talks to resolve nuclear crisis
Yow! Can you imagine how much better off everyone would be if we had elected a President who was too smart to get involved in those messes and left sleeping dictators lie?
I guess we should learn our lesson about that whole "democracy" thing in the US.
Ghandi wasn't trying to use pacifism defend a free people against invaders coming to enslave them. Ghandi was trying to free a people ruled by a small elite from a diminishing empire which possessed a basic decency. The Nazi Reich or Imperial Japan would have freely killed him and anyone who tried to resist, or failed to obey for that matter. Firing squads and gas chambers eliminated millions of non-violent resisters to Nazi evil. Ghandi must have recognized this himself despite the advice he had for the Jewish people as noted in The Ghandi Nobody Knows:
If you think Ghandi was a true pacifist, you should try reading up on the activities of Sergeant Major Ghandi in the Boer War. Follow that up with his views on Kashmir, and other matters involved in obtaining Indian independence. Here is a link or two, OK, three to get you going.
Yes, but should the government be forcing this "option." If it's an option that consumers want, then it can be offered as a service. That's how the free market works, you choose your service provider based on quality, price, and offerings.
Or, as another option, the "consumers" can vote and even lobby their representatives in government to regulate markets. That is how democracy works.
I think that your silence is best attributed to a proverb:
Evidence is persuasive, fanciful claims of political gnosis aren't. The truth of the matter is that you couldn't "salvage" anything even if you wanted to since both the condition that you think requires "salvage" and the understanding you claim are both your private fancy without connection to the actual events or things of this world. Your ideas and claims are void.
Transmeta had to eat another year of hardware engineering time and costs, chip fab costs, and lost market opportunity. If the first chip had worked as planned, then they might have had a real shot at setting the world on fire with their technology. As it was, the rest of the market had a chance to catch up. All because of the way Windows, in its own evil way,
It is the reputation of the CCCP and the US that are the same now-the US has by poorly thought, poorly planned, poorly executed operations throughout the latter half of the cold war and lowered its reputation to that held before the first world war of a nation with wasted potential.
Tell it to the people of Eastern Europe who no longer toil under the Soviet yoke but instead are building new economies and new democracies. Tell it to the people of Ukraine, who so recently took another major step toward freedom.
That was the reputation of the CCCP since Stalin and the Bolsheviks took power and is now as described the reputation of the US and has been for the greater part of the past 30 years.
Since '75? Hardly. Well, maybe while Jimmy Carter was President, but not since Reagan took ofice. The US is quite vital and successful, thank you.
You seem to be caught up in wishful thinking. (Or maybe you are just badly informed.)
Ta ta.
Yeah, Russia had absolutely nothing to do with that.
No, the Soviet Union (not Russia) had something to do with it, but it is quite likely that the war would have gone in a different direction without the US. The US helped to keep the UK in the war and split the German forces which kept about 60 divisions, including some of their best, in the West. The US also poured massive amounts of food and material into the USSR including that vital commodity of modern warfare, the truck. I doubt that even the Soviets would have held out against Germany fighting a single front war against the USSR, especially if the USSR couldn't get the massive amounts of supplies from the US and UK.
I know nobody here will admit it, but we are the same.
Not admit it? I specifically reject it. Your attempt to portray the US and USSR as the same is a farce. Stalin killed at least as many Soviet citizens than the Nazis. How many tens of millions of Americans did Roosevelt round up and kill? (Hint: 0) And could you point out where the US did to a country in Western Europe the equivalent of what the USSR did to the liberalization movements or uprisings in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany?
e.g. dropping tonnes of bombs and chemicals on Viet Nam was a very eloquent way to say "fuck off and die", meanwhile "stated goals" of freedom and democracy were for American domestic consumption.
The dropping of bombs and use of chemicals in Viet Nam was a pretty direct way to tell the North Viet Namese Army which was in the process of invading South Viet Nam to "fuck off and die". It was pretty successful too as North Viet Nam ultimately signed a peace treaty. Unfortunately they violated the treaty as soon as the US withdrew, invaded and captured South Viet Nam. As imperfect as the South was as a country, it took the conquest of the South by the North to drive huge numbers of Viet Namese to become "boat people". I guess the South was a victim of "domestic consumption" of the North, eh?
In some ways it's worse than a dictatorship, if you think about it. Most people in nasty dictatorships have an all-to-clear a picture of exactly what kind of behaviors will get them 'disappeared.'
I can understand your problem. Apparently you, like about 15% of Americans, have a problem distinguishing what could be considered good versus bad in regard to the war against Al Qaeda and its associates. I've prepared a short guide to help you past these difficulties.
Good Buying pie to take to church picknic
Bad Putting arsenic into pie at church picnic to impress Osama
Good Taking pictures of statue of Liberty to remember trip and show neighbors
Bad Taking picutres of Statue of Liberty to plan where to put bombs with rest of your cell
Good Using web mail to keep in touch with Grandma
Bad Using web mail to check if today is the day you strap on bombs for Martyrdom
Good Attending City Council meeting to speak up about bad roads
Bad Assassinating City Council
Good Donating money to the Girl Scouts
Bad Acting as front man for fake Islamic charity funneling money to Al Qaeda
Good Buying everyone a round of drinks
Bad Shooting everyone in the bar
Good Sight-seeing Japan
Bad Taking secret training in Pakistan to make war on Western infidels
Good Having a pen pal with whom you trade cultural and person observations for world peace
Bad Collecting secret information to make the next hijacking easier
Good Having a job to pay your bills
Bad Taking a job to get closer to a target for the next bombing attack
Good Attending a meeting to plan a demonstration (in favor of | against) American policy
Bad Meeting with the rest of the cell to plan how to block escape routes so more infidels die
Good Offering to take in a former convict from a half-way house to make a new life
Bad Using your home as a "safe house" to hide an ambush squad in route to their mission
Now, this might be a lot of deail, so you can boil it down to a fairly simple heuristic: If the activity contributes to violent attacks against America or Americans, it is almost certain to be a bad thing under the anti-terrorists laws.
Is this helping?
Linux runs skynet... literally. :(
:(
If it ran Windows we would have a chance. Now the rise of the Machines is inevitable.
Why couldn't people stick to porting to toasters and watches?
Should start saying Apple/Mach now?
I don't think that is needed since more than enough people mock Apple already.
Interesting. What does Christianity, as opposed to any particular individual Christian, brand as evil that you find objectionable?
When Christian fundamentalists hear that humans are animals descended from apes, they think they hear that humans are "just animals". Right and wrong don't apply to animals. They fear that the only basis they can imagine for morality is being destroyed.
I don't think that you've quite captured the issue, at least as I see it. The Bible teaches that God exists and created mankind in a special act of creation. Evolution attacks that position by saying that man arose by a purely natural process, no God required. In essence, evolution practically attacks the idea of God, the special creation of man, and the special nature of man. (Man made in God's image.) Now, you can still have moral codes without God, that is obvious. What you have a much more difficult time doing, if you can do it at all, is to arrive at a univeral moral law external to us. If there is no God, why should I consider your moral code better than mine, or Bob's? Your code may say men should be angels, but mine says nothing is forbidden to me. If there is no established moral order to the uinverse, no God, how do you choose? Force? Vote? Luck of the draw? First call? City rules? It is really moral chaos. There are also some basic questions about the nature of man that come out of the issue as well. The traditional Christian view is that mankind is born with a corrupted nature that is drawn to do wrong, a sin nature, that only God can remedy. Many other religions or philosophies belive that man is basically good at heart without that corruption.
As to your view that, "You can't reason with creationists because reason doesn't work against fear" is silly. Being a creationist doesn't make you insane, irrational, or stupid. (I know that chair of a Physics department who is a creationist, last I knew.) It does mean that you approach the universe, or dare I say, creation, with a very different set of assumptions about life, the universe, and everything. Some of those assumptions will have little to no impact on day to day life, others will have a profound influence.
The correct way (if this was science and not religion) would be to look for something that CONTRADICTED the hypothesis that it is impossible for complex systems to evolve.
Not at all. It is entirely proper scientifically to try to falsify the hypothesis that complex systems can evolve, even if it seems certain that they did. How do you think that the current theories about punctuated equilibria evol... er.. developed? Rechecking previous work happens regularly in science. That is how mistakes are found, ironed out, and theories strengthened. Newton's theories seemed pretty tight until those cracks started showing. Admittedly it will grow tiresome to some, but if there is a genuine problem found it should be looked at. The work of the creationists and ID advocates will only serve to either improve current natural selection / evolutionary theory, or help replace it with something better, even if it causes considerable consternation in the process.
I'm curious.... where do you think the violence is in "genuine christianity"?
Don't you see the problem with the refusal of absolute pacifists to confront and oppose evil under any condition?
...Seriously guys. The joke's over. OVER. We're all getting very, very afraid of you. I'm starting to be a lot more comfortable with the notion that China and India may soon be superpowers. I'm actually *glad* Russia still has a massive arsenal of nukes: Putin may be a dictator-by-proxy, but AT LEAST HE'S NOT INSANE..... ...And if you're not a religious nutcase but you are in the U.S., don't fucking apologise. DO SOMETHING. You are to blame for letting these rabid fundamentalists take over. YOU have to stop them.
Ok, I'll now be modded into oblivion, but I feel slightly better.
####THIS POST BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE WONDERS OF SCIENCE####
The United States has been both a leader in science and industry in the world as well as a nation of strong religious faith for a very long time. The Harvard MBA - fighter pilot President of the United States who announced the goal of the United States to go to Mars might just have a clue or two that eludes you.
However, you do raise some points worth discussing. Bringing the burning light of reason to the Christian world is, no doubt, long overdue in some people's minds. The question is, who will do it? The French secularists who perpetrated Revolutionary terror? Perhaps the pagans of Nazi Germany or ancient Rome? (Yes, pagans. Look it up.) How about the atheists of the Soviet Union, North Korea, and the rest of the Communist block with their harsh repression of religion and agitation for atheism? Or perhaps the modern Europeans can show the United States the way, that is if they hurry before their imploding native populations (why is that?) and high immigration rates turn Europe into an Islamic continent in about 50 years. With all of the wrongs that you attribute to Christianity in the United States, shouldn't you be more concerned about paganism and atheism in Europe and Asia, particularly given the massive body count they created, often in their own country? (1-200,000,000) Or is it Christianity that scares you more than massive body counts?
Frankly you come off as less of an advocate for science than as simply anti-religious, perhaps to the point of mania. The two aren't the same.
lynchin a group of oppressors is not, imho, a bad thing.
Extrajudicial lynching is a bad thing, a very bad thing. That is the way of lawlessness. When society devolves into lawlessness, everybody suffers. If, on the other hand, said individuals committed a crime, are tried, found guilty and executed, then OK.
Imagine if someone went out and lynched a few nazi's back in the day - would you cry for them?
That would have been a war crime. See the answer above. It is a bad thing.
Imagine if someone lynched a few KKK members, would you cry for them?
Still a crime. See previous answers.
Hurting a group who likes to oppress people is not the same thing the group does.
It is exactly the same as what they are doing. You just disagree with what constitutes grounds to commit the same outrage, to take the law into your own hands.
The group is oppressing people for nonsensical reasons - my desire to oppress them is because they are hurting innocents - thusly not being innocents themselves.
And by going outside the law you are no longer innocent yourself. Your impulse is to travel down a very dangerous, destructive road.
When can I expect the death camps to begin?
It is most likely to be after enough people who take your views seriously get just enough power to rule the majority by some combination of force, guile, and perverted law.
(Maybe the "funny" moderation should be changed to "ha ha funny" so nobody gets confused.)
We have a republic, if we can keep it.
Anti-discrimination laws make no mention of a preferred class of people.
Allow me to quibble and say "protected," not "preferred."
They're written in a completely neutral way and apply equally to all, e.g. "it is illegal to fire someone on the basis of their race, gender, or sexual orientation"--not "it is illegal to fire someone for being black, female, or gay."
It all depends on the enforcement, doesn't it? It almost doesn't matter much what happens to you if you are a straight white male, your chance of getting legal relief for a real injustice of any magnitude is vanishingly small, except for maybe age discrimination, but even that is dicey. You would probably come out ahead standing out in a thunderstorm and trying to be hit by lightning to collect the insurance money. On the other hand, most employers would be terrified of firing a black lesbian who was looting the company treasury unless they had video, a sting, a long paper trail, the blessing of the corporate attorney, DA, and the blessing of an oracle.
Playing the race/gay/gender card isn't popular "just because," it is popular because it is effective.
Other then that, a good lynchin of bastards who want to take away the rights of others because they are different (and pose no real threat to anyone else) wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Oh the irony.
Well, what's a little extrajudicial terror against unpopular groups? Anyone for the formation of the GayGayGay*?
*Say it fast.
I don't really see an anti-discrimination law as "special rights".
Sure it is. Anti-discrimination laws elevate specific classes of persons or their attributes to a protected status. That is, by definition, a "special right." That can happen either directly in the law itself, or in the customary manner of enforcement. Once that protection is in place, it can be used as a bludgeon to beat down or punish anyone whose views do not agree with those of a protected person. "You don't cheer and advocate my relationship? That is bigotry! Discrimination! Hostile environment! Sue sue sue!" There are plenty of other cans of worms that can be opened as well. And please don't say that won't happen.
As the China and Indian get wealthier they wont give a fucking shit about the US and UK getting poorer, just like we didnt give a shit about them living in poverty and squalor while we enjoyed our spin on the affluence merry go round.
I take it that the whole Chinese-Maoist-Communist "kill 35,000,000+ of our own people while destroying the economy by collectivization and cultural revolution" thing slipped by you, right? But hey, what's a little mega-murder and communist "economics" among friends? Cough. Cough. cannibalism?
Upgrade, your hardware is shit.
.... Thats what I thought.
LOL. Sorry junior, I don't work out of Mom's basement. When something works well enough, we use it until we need to replace it. Better eye candy isn't really a good enough reason to upgrade our systems which are older than I care for, but aren't that old. Thanks for the laugh though. (Do you think you would be willing to underwrite the port to new hardware for some of our apps? Some of them only run on 1 or 2 microprocessor families, X86 isn't one of them.)
Such as?
Excessive memory footprint? Excessive CPU use? Those get to be a drag on systems with 20 people on them. Well, actually it can also be inconvenient on a workstation with only 1 person on a graphical console and several others working remotely.
No you didn't.
How is GNOME not functional?
Gnome is functional, but so is CDE, and that is the point. CDE is functional enough with lower overhead, better behavior, and fewer bugs.
Its integration with GNOME apps is far beyond anything CDE provides.
It provides pleny of things we don't gneed or care about while consuming more resources. No win there.
At least before Sun goes under, and it becomes a drain on Linux developers.
Like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, etc., are "drains" on "Linux developers"?
Actually it is more like the reverse. Sun has underwritten the NFS v4 implementation that is in the Linux 2.6 kernel, as well donated large amounts of code that help make Linux stronger, like Open Office, Internationalization code for X, etc. If it wasn't for Sun, Linux would be weaker. A large amount of useful code in Linux today is only there due to the charity of large companies like Sun, IBM, SGI, etc..
Sorry, but that is more of a hardware issue than a software issue, at least up to 32 CPUs. There aren't many PCs/Windows boxes made that take more than 8 CPUs. Unisys is one of the few (only?) manufacturers that make them.
I will also point out that there are a lot of Linux based datacenters that look exactly like your description of a Windows datacenter.