If you'll RTFA, you'll discover that Kehoe had a breakthrough of his own some time earler: he found how to bind the dye to the surficant layer so that it didn't pool in the bottom of the bubble. Without that it wouldn't matter what dye you used; you couldn't have colored bubbles.
The extinction of the giant lemur (which happened about 2,000 years ago) had nothing to do with "ignorance and superstition". Apparently they were good eatin'. Even now "ignorance and superstition" has contributed nothing to their plight except for their names. Population pressures and concomitant habitat destruction are more the problem.
You're not going to get an answer to your question. People like me who agree with you don't understand it either, and to everyone else you're a blasphemer, as the current moderation on this question indicates.
I saw Star Wars (I suppose they're calling it "ANH" or Episode 4 these days, although there was no hint of that in the titles at the time) in the theaters when it first came out, and it was really cool!. But I was 14 at the time, so that's to be expected. Now? Meh. The writing is vapid, the acting (with notable exceptions for the older actors) is wooden, and there are plot holes you could drive a truck through. The special effects were good though.
Exactly! This needs to be professionally written in such a way that it has a very good chance of standing up in court. To take a vote among a group of legally unqualified geeks will not help achieve this.
The thing about a story that links two articles is that you have to read both of them to RTFA. You won't find the quote in the Slate article, but in the PC World article. It's the last sentence of the second-to-last paragraph.
Because Arabian camel drivers made their money from the goods their camel was carrying, but modern insurance companies make their money from the leftover funds in the pool after they pay out for all the dead camels. Of course they're going to keep all of it!
Yes, in theory the commandments of Christ should bind a believing Christian in everything he does. In practice everyone is less than fully successful at it, which is why we also hope for forgiveness. The moral teachings must be adhered to, but the impulse to do so comes from within, not without. The very radically devoted Christians (I speak from the viewpoint of an Orthodox Christian) are those who enter a monastery and thereby do accept a large degree of external control over their actions that is absent for everyone else. Even there, obedience is often more a goal than an achievement. And as the saying goes, the monastery gates are not locked.
You seriously mischaracterize religious teachings. They are generally self-consistent, which means that (like the systems of Plato and Confucius) they begin with some statements of principle and proceed from there to deduce (or infer, if you like) consequences. This is not always done explicitly, but it is generally evident on analysis. It's therefore true that if you accept the principles, then the consequences must follow. Of course it sometimes happens that you end up with a consequence you don't "personally" agree with, but that's hardly a distinction of a religious system.
The primary difference between religious and philosphical systems of thought are that the religious derives its principles from what is believed to be divine revelation, while the philosophical does not. But the two are not otherwise grossly dissimilar. In both cases you can choose to reject one or more of the acknowledged practical consequences of the principles laid down by the teachers, but if the system is at all consistent this often involves rejecting the principle too. If you do this enough, at some point you cease to be a follower of that teacher in any meaningful sense.
Your example of the frequent disobedience actually demonstrates the opposite of what you hoped it would. Isn't it clear that Christians are perfectly free, in the practical sense, to disregard their religion's teachings? The more natural thing to conclude from that is that this religion has no power to enforce any particular code of behavior!
Yes, what you describe happens. We call these occasions "sins", and it's a rare Christian who seriously claims to be free of them. (Actually, making such a claim immediately falsifies it since it's ipso facto prideful.) It usually has nothing to do with whether or not one accepts the teachings, but everything to do with whether one is capable of impelling oneself to follow them. In the two-millennia long history of the Church, it has been observed that sin comes from inattention or weakness far more often than it does from willful disobedience, at least among sincere followers.
War is a sticky problem. It's obviously necessary at times for the defense of the state. But at the same time, while the Church (my Church, anyway) might bless the troops heading into battle (for the troops' sake), it also has a canon where a soldier who kills in combat is placed under a penance for several years, and decries war in general. We are sometimes placed in situations where no course seems wholly good. Then we do the best we can, and trust in God's mercy. That's true in many other instances besides a war. But I don't think your example holds water anyway. You have no way of knowing how many troops choose not to shoot back. We might reasonably guess that fewer of them come back to tell us about it than those who do.
Your example of the North Korean man doesn't work either. As long as he complies voluntarily with the state, he will never feel the state's coercive power. That will change the moment he stops complying. The same is not true of Christianity. Sin all you like: submission to the Church's discipline remains voluntary. It can impose no material punishment on its own. (This is true today, and ideally true always, no matter what was true on occasions when the Church was suborned as a tool of the state, or even worse, when the Church became a political power itself. Both are distortions of what the Church should be, so it should not be surprising that under those conditions it behaves in ways that are also distortions.) Whether or not you believe the consequences it says will arrive someday is also a voluntary matter, and many do reject. Or haven't you noticed how many seem to assume these days that everyone is going to heaven?
"The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom", but it's only the beginning. We are to grow in love, not fear.
Yes, the teachings of Christ bind your behavior, but there's very little that an external authority (like, for instance, a Catholic school) can do to make you adhere to them in the long run. You are conflating the coercive obedience imposed by authority with the voluntary obedience of someone following a respected teacher. They are not at all the same thing.
This is a nifty little sermon, but you've missed the mark. Of course it's about obeying the commands of Jesus Christ. I even provided links to one of the more important. But this is accomplished from within, not from external control, which is the subject under discussion. In other words, it's not the control imposed by the earthly Church organization that saves you -- although voluntarily submitting yourself to it can help -- but it's about the transformation of the self in following Christ.
I pity you that your brand of Christianity operates through fear, as you attest. It is far better to aspire to heaven from love God.
But - and I mean this with the utmost, non-flamebait sincerity - isn't a big part of Christianity the ability to control people and their behavior?
No, not at all. That's a ridiculous (although not uncommon) caricature. I won't deny that occasionally Christianity has become a tool of the state, and in those cases it has become one of a number of means by which the state attempts to control its population, but control over the masses is really foreign to the Christian ethic. It's far more about the individual learning to control himself. When it becomes about controlling others, it devolves into a mere cult.
It indeed is intended to draw focus away from earthly things -- or rather, one earthly thing: the self. The only path to heaven is on earth, by doing good for others, treating them the way you would wish to be treated, giving what is needed. It is all about serving others. Most Christians do not forget the admonition in one of the Epistles that faith without works is dead.
"Blaze"? You meant "blasé", methinks. Of course, I'll look like an idiot if the e with the accent doesn't render properly.
In any event, people aren't blasé about this, they're up in arms, or didn't you read the article? And the fact that this is in America makes little difference: this is being imposed by a religious school that has no governmental connections beyond its accreditation, and which is therefore under no First Amendment obligations with respect to its students. I doubt even the parent post would have been so insouciant (you put me in the mood for French loanwords) about it had it been a public school attempting to do this. Now that would be an item. As it is this is barely news. "Catholic institution attempts to control the minds of its inmates! Story at eleven!"
As I said, IANAL. I was just disputing the earlier assertion about verbal contracts.
As I also said, there are other reasons why a EULA might not stand up in court, and I've been given to understand that some of the reasons you mention may or may not be one of them. But this is beyond anything I claim to know much about.
Unless you're just using the occasion of my post to throw the questions out there and didn't mean to direct them at me.
Well, it's not clear that that's true either. The difference between a shrink-wrap EULA and something like the GPL is that the terms of the former aren't disclosed until you actually try to install the thing. Furthermore you're paying for it, and it's generally expected that in exchange for such "consideration" you're supposed to get something in return. If there were a way to get a refund on software you've opened that would be one thing, but that's generally not possible -- and one of the licenses we're discussing here even tries to prohibit one of the last-ditch methods of doing that, possibly in defiance of their own vendor agreement with the credit card companies. The situation is altogether unclear. I believe I've heard of different cases going different ways.
Most legally binding things can't be done via a simple verbal contract, they require a signature.
You are clearly NAL. IANAL either, but I do know that verbal contracts are just as binding as written contracts. With a written contract the advantage is that the terms are laid out in a permanent form that's not reliant on the memory or honesty of the parties. But if the terms of a verbal contract can be established -- say, by witnesses, or if the parties actually agree about what the terms were -- it has the same force as a written contract in most cases.
Of course, a EULA is written and not verbal, so this isn't a sensible analysis anyway. There are a number of reasons why they might not stand up in court, but being "verbal" isn't one of them.
This necessarily reflects the areas where I do the most editing myself.
Easter, where far more verbiage than otherwise necessary has been introduced to oppose the views of a tiny minority of ultra-fundamentalists. This is a good example of another problem: much of the writing is substandard, and new substandard text is added faster than the existing work can be corrected.
Nikolai Velimirovi, which has been slapped with an NPOV tag because it dares to suggest that a speech made from a window at Dachau while an inmate there just maybe does not express his honest personal opinion.
Religion, and indeed any religious topic at all, is a virtual battlefield. It's almost impossible to get a True Believer who is not naturally introspective to realize that his beliefs are not universally accepted and can't be described as objective fact.
These are just some examples I could put my hands on quickly. I run across others very often.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn know-it-all kids think they invented obfuscation. Ha! And get the hell offa my lawn!</GEEZER>
It seems to me that confirming (or refuting) a key prediction of relativity is a moderately good story, at least.
If you'll RTFA, you'll discover that Kehoe had a breakthrough of his own some time earler: he found how to bind the dye to the surficant layer so that it didn't pool in the bottom of the bubble. Without that it wouldn't matter what dye you used; you couldn't have colored bubbles.
I prefer Absolut, but I suppose vanilla extract would do in a pinch.
The extinction of the giant lemur (which happened about 2,000 years ago) had nothing to do with "ignorance and superstition". Apparently they were good eatin'. Even now "ignorance and superstition" has contributed nothing to their plight except for their names. Population pressures and concomitant habitat destruction are more the problem.
I saw Star Wars (I suppose they're calling it "ANH" or Episode 4 these days, although there was no hint of that in the titles at the time) in the theaters when it first came out, and it was really cool!. But I was 14 at the time, so that's to be expected. Now? Meh. The writing is vapid, the acting (with notable exceptions for the older actors) is wooden, and there are plot holes you could drive a truck through. The special effects were good though.
I tried that once, but then it proved impossible to spawn new processes.
Exactly! This needs to be professionally written in such a way that it has a very good chance of standing up in court. To take a vote among a group of legally unqualified geeks will not help achieve this.
Hey! You kids! Get the hell offa my chattels afore I sic my dogs on ya!
You mean there's a difference?
The thing about a story that links two articles is that you have to read both of them to RTFA. You won't find the quote in the Slate article, but in the PC World article. It's the last sentence of the second-to-last paragraph.
Because Arabian camel drivers made their money from the goods their camel was carrying, but modern insurance companies make their money from the leftover funds in the pool after they pay out for all the dead camels. Of course they're going to keep all of it!
If this means we can have Bell Labs back as it was in its heyday, then I'm all for it.
Yes, in theory the commandments of Christ should bind a believing Christian in everything he does. In practice everyone is less than fully successful at it, which is why we also hope for forgiveness. The moral teachings must be adhered to, but the impulse to do so comes from within, not without. The very radically devoted Christians (I speak from the viewpoint of an Orthodox Christian) are those who enter a monastery and thereby do accept a large degree of external control over their actions that is absent for everyone else. Even there, obedience is often more a goal than an achievement. And as the saying goes, the monastery gates are not locked.
The primary difference between religious and philosphical systems of thought are that the religious derives its principles from what is believed to be divine revelation, while the philosophical does not. But the two are not otherwise grossly dissimilar. In both cases you can choose to reject one or more of the acknowledged practical consequences of the principles laid down by the teachers, but if the system is at all consistent this often involves rejecting the principle too. If you do this enough, at some point you cease to be a follower of that teacher in any meaningful sense.
Your example of the frequent disobedience actually demonstrates the opposite of what you hoped it would. Isn't it clear that Christians are perfectly free, in the practical sense, to disregard their religion's teachings? The more natural thing to conclude from that is that this religion has no power to enforce any particular code of behavior!
Yes, what you describe happens. We call these occasions "sins", and it's a rare Christian who seriously claims to be free of them. (Actually, making such a claim immediately falsifies it since it's ipso facto prideful.) It usually has nothing to do with whether or not one accepts the teachings, but everything to do with whether one is capable of impelling oneself to follow them. In the two-millennia long history of the Church, it has been observed that sin comes from inattention or weakness far more often than it does from willful disobedience, at least among sincere followers.
War is a sticky problem. It's obviously necessary at times for the defense of the state. But at the same time, while the Church (my Church, anyway) might bless the troops heading into battle (for the troops' sake), it also has a canon where a soldier who kills in combat is placed under a penance for several years, and decries war in general. We are sometimes placed in situations where no course seems wholly good. Then we do the best we can, and trust in God's mercy. That's true in many other instances besides a war. But I don't think your example holds water anyway. You have no way of knowing how many troops choose not to shoot back. We might reasonably guess that fewer of them come back to tell us about it than those who do.
Your example of the North Korean man doesn't work either. As long as he complies voluntarily with the state, he will never feel the state's coercive power. That will change the moment he stops complying. The same is not true of Christianity. Sin all you like: submission to the Church's discipline remains voluntary. It can impose no material punishment on its own. (This is true today, and ideally true always, no matter what was true on occasions when the Church was suborned as a tool of the state, or even worse, when the Church became a political power itself. Both are distortions of what the Church should be, so it should not be surprising that under those conditions it behaves in ways that are also distortions.) Whether or not you believe the consequences it says will arrive someday is also a voluntary matter, and many do reject. Or haven't you noticed how many seem to assume these days that everyone is going to heaven?
Yes, the teachings of Christ bind your behavior, but there's very little that an external authority (like, for instance, a Catholic school) can do to make you adhere to them in the long run. You are conflating the coercive obedience imposed by authority with the voluntary obedience of someone following a respected teacher. They are not at all the same thing.
I pity you that your brand of Christianity operates through fear, as you attest. It is far better to aspire to heaven from love God.
No, not at all. That's a ridiculous (although not uncommon) caricature. I won't deny that occasionally Christianity has become a tool of the state, and in those cases it has become one of a number of means by which the state attempts to control its population, but control over the masses is really foreign to the Christian ethic. It's far more about the individual learning to control himself. When it becomes about controlling others, it devolves into a mere cult.
It indeed is intended to draw focus away from earthly things -- or rather, one earthly thing: the self. The only path to heaven is on earth, by doing good for others, treating them the way you would wish to be treated, giving what is needed. It is all about serving others. Most Christians do not forget the admonition in one of the Epistles that faith without works is dead.
If this is "population control", then so be it.
In any event, people aren't blasé about this, they're up in arms, or didn't you read the article? And the fact that this is in America makes little difference: this is being imposed by a religious school that has no governmental connections beyond its accreditation, and which is therefore under no First Amendment obligations with respect to its students. I doubt even the parent post would have been so insouciant (you put me in the mood for French loanwords) about it had it been a public school attempting to do this. Now that would be an item. As it is this is barely news. "Catholic institution attempts to control the minds of its inmates! Story at eleven!"
As I also said, there are other reasons why a EULA might not stand up in court, and I've been given to understand that some of the reasons you mention may or may not be one of them. But this is beyond anything I claim to know much about.
Unless you're just using the occasion of my post to throw the questions out there and didn't mean to direct them at me.
Well, it's not clear that that's true either. The difference between a shrink-wrap EULA and something like the GPL is that the terms of the former aren't disclosed until you actually try to install the thing. Furthermore you're paying for it, and it's generally expected that in exchange for such "consideration" you're supposed to get something in return. If there were a way to get a refund on software you've opened that would be one thing, but that's generally not possible -- and one of the licenses we're discussing here even tries to prohibit one of the last-ditch methods of doing that, possibly in defiance of their own vendor agreement with the credit card companies. The situation is altogether unclear. I believe I've heard of different cases going different ways.
You are clearly NAL. IANAL either, but I do know that verbal contracts are just as binding as written contracts. With a written contract the advantage is that the terms are laid out in a permanent form that's not reliant on the memory or honesty of the parties. But if the terms of a verbal contract can be established -- say, by witnesses, or if the parties actually agree about what the terms were -- it has the same force as a written contract in most cases.
Of course, a EULA is written and not verbal, so this isn't a sensible analysis anyway. There are a number of reasons why they might not stand up in court, but being "verbal" isn't one of them.
Sheesh!
Easter, where far more verbiage than otherwise necessary has been introduced to oppose the views of a tiny minority of ultra-fundamentalists. This is a good example of another problem: much of the writing is substandard, and new substandard text is added faster than the existing work can be corrected.
Nikolai Velimirovi, which has been slapped with an NPOV tag because it dares to suggest that a speech made from a window at Dachau while an inmate there just maybe does not express his honest personal opinion.
Religion, and indeed any religious topic at all, is a virtual battlefield. It's almost impossible to get a True Believer who is not naturally introspective to realize that his beliefs are not universally accepted and can't be described as objective fact.
These are just some examples I could put my hands on quickly. I run across others very often.