This is hardly a time for this kind of discussion... but this kind of loss is so hard to explain and we often turn to these kinds of discussions to rationalize the irrational. They help us come to grip with the magnitude of the event. Something I heard yesterday about the guns possibly being stolen (the serial numbers were filed off) made me wonder if the problem here isn't the fact that one can get guns to begin with but rather how we glorify violence as a solution to problems in our society in general.
On the topic of gun control: So let's take all the guns away from law-abiding citizens so that only the criminals have guns... or so only the government has guns. Not sure what the difference is there but that's better, isn't it... not! Sorry, I'd rather take my chances with a gun in my hand than with a corrupt regime in power in the US any day. Europeans have rolled over and allowed their governments to own them... but they're much safer, aren't they? And that's all that matters... safety first after all!
I hope we never trade our freedom for safety. Someday, if we get a government in power that is for the people, by the people, and of the people again, we could look at not having to worry about owning guns, but since the government is controlled by corporations bent on profit at any cost, then we need to be able to defend ourselves from criminals who don't have our best interests in mind.
Define sentient as it relates to animals, and then define the process for defining it, changing it, reviewing it, re-defining it, etc... suddenly we have diversity on what is defined as sentient, which would translate to geographical differences on how animals are treated (which might be the case now... I don't really know). So in New York, chimps get a set of rights that are different than California... what happens when a chimp travels from one place to another. Could you take your chimp and sell it in one place for medical research, while it is illegal where you're from? Did you violate its "human" rights?
What about positive rights... does a chimp have a right to throw its poo at pedestrians in front of your house in Florida, but in Texas its legal to shoot a chimp that does this to you?
Point here... I think we're opening a big fat can of worms when we haven't even been able to effectively satisfy these questions regarding humans (especially the poo question). We cannot even define sentient status when it comes to humans... I have seen people refer to it on this thread as something that humans arrive at somewhere between 2 and 5 years, God-given, arrived at because they are human period, or may actually lose if they become incapacitated. There is obvious disparities in people's definition, so how do we even begin to say a chimp is sentient when we cannot even define it related to humans.
Will there be a Supreme Court for chimps, a whole branch of judiciary for animals? Now we're talking money... do you think anyone will be willing to pay for this?
Dude... are you living under a rock or what...? This happens all the time. Big businesses are sued by non-involved parties all the time... every time a bank buys another bank for instance, some moron comes up with a law-suit saying that they won't have the same access to retail banking, or that loans will be harder to get, or whatever... this is extremely common.
What's shocking about this whole thing is as a society we have fallen to expecting public entities like government, companies, and schools, to police this sort of stuff. Responsibility begins at home. If you don't want it in your house, you don't have to have it! This is *still* a free country (for now) and no one is going to force you to expose you or your children to anything objectionable.
The problem is, the people who are willing to go to lengths like this to sue are the same people who lack the parental courage to tell their kids they can't have the POS game to begin with because they can't stand hearing their kids complain that they don't have the latest or the best of anything.
People... get over it, we live in a free market society and it's time to stop trying to shift the blame to that market and take responsibility for the content you and your family consume. If you don't like it, don't give them your money... I guarantee you that this will send a message way more powerful than any judge can.
Rock on... they are all the same group of people and that's the truth. Once people start figuring out that they're all owned by the corporations who's agenda is completely out of sync with individual's rights and responsibilities, the real discussion can begin on what needs to change.
The real problem here is that they want you to get wrapped up in sorry-ass emotional issues like abortion, gun control, gay-rights, and a bunch of other crap like that. Notice how there's tons of media-fed discussion on emotional topics like this, but rarely any real action??? Regardless on which side of any one of those topics you fall on, you're rarely happy with the elected people who are supposedly representing you on these topics and what they're doing about them.
Meanwhile our rights are slowly eroded away by the same group of people as they pass things like the RealID act 100/0 in the US Senate. How much reporting and news-talk time did that get??? But most people are too busy worrying about whether two men can get married, or if the flag can be burned, or if you can smoke weed... after all, these are the pressing issues, at least according to the talking babble-heads at fox and cnn.
Watch how these topics begin to take center-stage during the next presidential election... ask yourself though, will anything really change with regards to any of them and are these the issues that are really important? I mean, the next president isn't going to be any more effective on these issues because he doesn't have to be... he just has to whip up enough support through emotional manipulation to get elected. The next election will be extremely close, just like the last one, because the important issues that most people do agree on aren't valid topics of discussion... only the emotionally devisive issues are.
By the way, IMO the real irony here is that these issues should be left up to individual states and localities, and decided by the electorate in those areas.
I've had great luck with integrated calendaring using Kontact/Kmail/KCalendar... I receive invites from Lotus Notes users and Exchange users (outlook email client) and am able to click accept/decline buttons built into the invites email messages. Kontact manages to interprit the iCal stuff as an invite and apparently adds these clickable links to the email and then returns a reply to the meeting requestor as well as adds it to my calendar.
I then sync my Treo to it using KPilot and all is included... even meeting notes, location info, recurrance, and alerts.
Occasionally I get a time-zone mistake, or it fails to add the meeting with an event alarm, but considering that I don't have to use the cruddy Lotus or Exchange clients I will gladly live with these minor annoyances.
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This is hardly a time for this kind of discussion... but this kind of loss is so hard to explain and we often turn to these kinds of discussions to rationalize the irrational. They help us come to grip with the magnitude of the event. Something I heard yesterday about the guns possibly being stolen (the serial numbers were filed off) made me wonder if the problem here isn't the fact that one can get guns to begin with but rather how we glorify violence as a solution to problems in our society in general.
On the topic of gun control: So let's take all the guns away from law-abiding citizens so that only the criminals have guns... or so only the government has guns. Not sure what the difference is there but that's better, isn't it... not! Sorry, I'd rather take my chances with a gun in my hand than with a corrupt regime in power in the US any day. Europeans have rolled over and allowed their governments to own them... but they're much safer, aren't they? And that's all that matters... safety first after all!
I hope we never trade our freedom for safety. Someday, if we get a government in power that is for the people, by the people, and of the people again, we could look at not having to worry about owning guns, but since the government is controlled by corporations bent on profit at any cost, then we need to be able to defend ourselves from criminals who don't have our best interests in mind.
Define sentient as it relates to animals, and then define the process for defining it, changing it, reviewing it, re-defining it, etc... suddenly we have diversity on what is defined as sentient, which would translate to geographical differences on how animals are treated (which might be the case now... I don't really know). So in New York, chimps get a set of rights that are different than California... what happens when a chimp travels from one place to another. Could you take your chimp and sell it in one place for medical research, while it is illegal where you're from? Did you violate its "human" rights?
What about positive rights... does a chimp have a right to throw its poo at pedestrians in front of your house in Florida, but in Texas its legal to shoot a chimp that does this to you?
Point here... I think we're opening a big fat can of worms when we haven't even been able to effectively satisfy these questions regarding humans (especially the poo question). We cannot even define sentient status when it comes to humans... I have seen people refer to it on this thread as something that humans arrive at somewhere between 2 and 5 years, God-given, arrived at because they are human period, or may actually lose if they become incapacitated. There is obvious disparities in people's definition, so how do we even begin to say a chimp is sentient when we cannot even define it related to humans.
Will there be a Supreme Court for chimps, a whole branch of judiciary for animals? Now we're talking money... do you think anyone will be willing to pay for this?
Dude... are you living under a rock or what...? This happens all the time. Big businesses are sued by non-involved parties all the time... every time a bank buys another bank for instance, some moron comes up with a law-suit saying that they won't have the same access to retail banking, or that loans will be harder to get, or whatever... this is extremely common.
What's shocking about this whole thing is as a society we have fallen to expecting public entities like government, companies, and schools, to police this sort of stuff. Responsibility begins at home. If you don't want it in your house, you don't have to have it! This is *still* a free country (for now) and no one is going to force you to expose you or your children to anything objectionable.
The problem is, the people who are willing to go to lengths like this to sue are the same people who lack the parental courage to tell their kids they can't have the POS game to begin with because they can't stand hearing their kids complain that they don't have the latest or the best of anything.
People... get over it, we live in a free market society and it's time to stop trying to shift the blame to that market and take responsibility for the content you and your family consume. If you don't like it, don't give them your money... I guarantee you that this will send a message way more powerful than any judge can.
hey... Don't knock it till you try it! Freeze-dried pig is one bit o' tasty morsel.
Rock on... they are all the same group of people and that's the truth. Once people start figuring out that they're all owned by the corporations who's agenda is completely out of sync with individual's rights and responsibilities, the real discussion can begin on what needs to change.
The real problem here is that they want you to get wrapped up in sorry-ass emotional issues like abortion, gun control, gay-rights, and a bunch of other crap like that. Notice how there's tons of media-fed discussion on emotional topics like this, but rarely any real action??? Regardless on which side of any one of those topics you fall on, you're rarely happy with the elected people who are supposedly representing you on these topics and what they're doing about them.
Meanwhile our rights are slowly eroded away by the same group of people as they pass things like the RealID act 100/0 in the US Senate. How much reporting and news-talk time did that get??? But most people are too busy worrying about whether two men can get married, or if the flag can be burned, or if you can smoke weed... after all, these are the pressing issues, at least according to the talking babble-heads at fox and cnn.
Watch how these topics begin to take center-stage during the next presidential election... ask yourself though, will anything really change with regards to any of them and are these the issues that are really important? I mean, the next president isn't going to be any more effective on these issues because he doesn't have to be... he just has to whip up enough support through emotional manipulation to get elected. The next election will be extremely close, just like the last one, because the important issues that most people do agree on aren't valid topics of discussion... only the emotionally devisive issues are.
By the way, IMO the real irony here is that these issues should be left up to individual states and localities, and decided by the electorate in those areas.
I've had great luck with integrated calendaring using Kontact/Kmail/KCalendar... I receive invites from Lotus Notes users and Exchange users (outlook email client) and am able to click accept/decline buttons built into the invites email messages. Kontact manages to interprit the iCal stuff as an invite and apparently adds these clickable links to the email and then returns a reply to the meeting requestor as well as adds it to my calendar.
I then sync my Treo to it using KPilot and all is included... even meeting notes, location info, recurrance, and alerts.
Occasionally I get a time-zone mistake, or it fails to add the meeting with an event alarm, but considering that I don't have to use the cruddy Lotus or Exchange clients I will gladly live with these minor annoyances.