Well, this particular twerp wasn't actually elected. And for what it's worth, Labour's poll numbers are in the low twenties right now. (Besides, if you're an American then you're not really one to talk, now, are you?)
Their policies go far further than that - take a look at their proposed Freedom Bill. They're the only major party worth voting for on civil liberties right now, as far as I can tell.
Most lawsuits against people without serious money don't have a few million in potential damages at stake. Or an army of lawyers backing the plaintiff, with the accompanying promise that even if grandma is innocent the case is going to be dragged out until she's bankrupt. Or the "generous" immediate settlement offer of "only" ten thousand or so. And the justifications tend to pass the laugh test. And I suspect most people would stop at suing one helpless target.
In short, most lawsuits aren't naked extortion on a massive scale. These are.
(Disclaimer: I neither download nor buy, although I find the idea of piracy far more moral than the idea of giving these scumbags a single penny.)
Bullshit. I've seen a lot of people who thought America was losing, saw the amount of damage its presence was causing Iraq, and wanted to pull out and cut losses all round. I haven't seen anyone this side of a straw man who actually wanted Iraq to be a clusterfuck and hundreds of thousands to die just to discredit Bush. This guy, on the other hand, wants a complete economic collapse - which, at the end of the day, would probably have a similar death toll - just to discredit Obama.
On the other hand, pure avian flu wasn't spreading rapidly from human to human. It might be an over-reaction, but I think it's a stretch to call racism the primary motivation. (Of course, I don't live in the US...)
On the other hand, as someone who neither downloads nor buys, I'd say it's more moral to pirate than give those thieving bastards a single cent. So while a total boycott is the ideal solution (if only to deny them their nice shiny piracy statistics as a justification for lost sales), if people are going to give in and get the music then I'd rather they... well, not buy it!
No, max(author's lifetime, 25 years) would be reasonable. Just because since there are a few cases in which extending copyright past the author's death is justifiable doesn't mean it's still justifiable when the author has already profited from their work for seventy years.
Actually, it's none of the above - the queen specifically asked for the iPod (see here). I agree it would be nice to force the RIAA into commenting on legality, though.
Riposte is that every single Republican was happy with this "compromise", while the majority of Democrats were against it. There's a difference between compromise and unconditional surrender.
Hmm... I seem to remember seeing the figures for the total donations to his campaign from PAC members somewhere or other. It came to a couple of hundred thousand dollars out of a couple of hundred million - it was a pretty insignificant proportion. So it doesn't seem to be a viable loophole, and I'm not terribly upset with him.
Access to a lawyer? A fair trial? Humane conditions? A fixed sentence if found guilty, with freedom at the end? That sounds like a good start...
The essential problem is that Guantanamo is not in any way a normal jail. If it were, far fewer people would be complaining (and then only about the child soldiers).
1. It/really/ isn't entrapment - the student was in the UK. It would have been entrapment if the material had been hosted on a UK government website, or if he'd been arrested by the US government.
2. The government didn't actually notice the material being downloaded - we don't allow that sort of thing without a warrant (yet). The guy asked the sysadmin to print it for him because he couldn't afford the ink (1500 pages), and the sysadmin agreed. Then someone in the university noticed it on the sysadmin's computer and went to the police. No spying was involved, just your friendly neighbourhood curtain-twitcher.
That said, this is fucking ridiculous. What's worse is that since Gordon Brown doesn't resemble a cartoon supervillain to the degree that George Bush does, Labour actually has a decent shot in the next election...
Yay for ad hominem attacks! Seriously, read the post - it makes some good points. I game with a bow ranger, a blood magus (weak prestige class for a wizard), a cleric, a rogue and a half-giant psychic warrior. I'm a warblade. In terms of damage, at around 12th level the psychic warrior is doing less damage than an equivalent level barbarian would, and hitting less often (he has a cleric's BAB), but with a few nifty powers to make up for it. That's not really what I'd call broken.
It's possible there might be some broken builds out there that use the XPH, but let's face it - if you know what you're doing, you can make something/horribly/ broken just using Core. (CoDzilla, anyone?) The more important thing is that the average character is non-broken.
I'm doing a Computer Science degree in Cambridge (world ranking university, partnered with MIT). I'm getting top grades. That didn't mean terribly much to me, either - I understood the second sentence, but not the first. Granted I'm only in my first year, but the point here is that "Computer Science" != "Training to become a Linux sysadmin", and expertise in the former does not somehow confer expertise in the latter (although it makes it much easier to acquire).
Understanding the concepts behind algorithmic complexity and programming in general won't tell you anything about the specifics of shell scripting, any more than a deep understanding of C will give you the ability to code in FORTRAN without having some idea of the syntax.
So on average just under a cable a week? Compared to five cables in one week, in the same region, which happens to be one the US is nearly at war with. I'd still call that at least a fairly major coincidence.
Um... Those "cluster problems" on the video? They're easily the most efficient way of doing non-trivial mental arithmetic. (I'm a maths undergrad in Cambridge [UK] and they're the method I use.) Try doing 44*97 in your head with the standard algorithm, then try reducing it mentally to (50-6)*(100-3) = 5000-600-150+18 = 4268, and you'll see what I mean. I've/never/ run into problems with a proof due to an inability to do mental arithmetic.
The standard method, by contrast, is effectively useless in the modern age. It fails horribly for mental arithmetic, it teaches students nothing about the nature of mathematics, and when was the last time you had to work something out on pencil and paper?
Um... No. My defense relies on the game developers being kept uninformed by incompetent management and/or an incompetent legal department. That is, the game developers were told "OK, we're not doing Hot Coffee any more", rather than "OK, the ESRB is going to give us an AO rating if we keep Hot Coffee in there, so wipe out every trace of it." Probably because the managers concerned weren't programmers and had no idea how the programmers would handle things. And it's not a matter of the coders not being able to remove the minigame, it's a matter of it being one hell of a lot easier not to remove it, and the coders not realising that the ESRB would come down on Rockstar if someone made a mod to unlock it. I mean, frankly under the circumstances I wouldn't have expected the ESRB to come down on Rockstar were it not for the baying of the mob - after all, if little Timmy has the technical knowhow to download and install Hot Coffee, then little Timmy has the technical knowhow to browse pornography online to his heart's desire. Basically, you seem to be portraying this as a vast conspiracy that goes right the way to the top. It isn't. It's a miscommunication among people around the middle and bottom.
Easter eggs are totally different. Easter eggs are accessible in-game through an obscure sequence of in-game actions, and are intended to be very difficult to find. The content in Easter eggs is always a part of the finished product - it's of a quality the producer would be happy for the public to see. And they're ultimately accessible in-game, and sooner or later someone will find them and broadcast them to the Internet. That's how you hide something you want people to find as a bonus. Likewise, most hidden tracks (except for the ones that are genuine premastering errors) will be found eventually by people playing the CD normally. They don't stop the player after the "last" track, and the hidden track is revealed, or the hidden track is only accessible when the CD is played on a computer. Stuff like that. Again, the hidden tracks are of commercial quality - they're not filled with ambient noise and they don't have half the instruments missing.
What I am talking about, however, is content that cannot be accessed - even with in-game cheats - until you actually go in and start randomly changing values in memory. That's the sort of thing that can and does screw up your saves. They tend to be found a year or more after the game's release, if at all, and knowledge of their existence tends to be restricted to a very small number of people (with the exception of Hot Coffee). There's a lot of 'removed' content in Super Smash Bros. Melee, for example, that was only found a few months ago. It also tends to be hopelessly unfinished - the kind of embarassing stuff no sensible producer really wants leaked.
And who says the managers were lying? These are not technical people. They know they told the programmers to remove the minigame, they know the minigame is still there, the programmers try to explain the situation, and the managers come away with the impression that it was t3h h4x0rs and it involved changing the source code. Cue press statement idiocy. But really, there's stupidity and there's stupidity - how dumb would Rockstar have to be to consciously lie about something like that? When the truth will come out in approximately twenty nanoseconds, after the modder explains what he did? Not gonna happen.
And 17 year olds (the game was rated M in the first place) are "kids" now? Yeah... Sure...
Actually, it would be more accurate to say it only failed on the people that have no understanding of how game development really works. Developers do stuff like that all the time. It's standard practice. You just don't hear about it very often because normally the content that gets left in isn't objectionable in any way. Let's take a couple of random examples, off the top of my head. Guitar Hero has two tracks that aren't accessible from within the game, but can be accessed with an Action Replay cartridge (Trippolette and Graveyard Shift). They were cut from the game - maybe due to quality, maybe due to licensing issues, I don't know why - but they're still in there. Final Fantasy VII has a crapload of deleted scenes and FMVs on the discs, all accessible with cheat devices - see here for more info. It's common practice.
So why is it common practice? Well, if you want to remove a scene you have two basic options. You can try to dyke out every single piece of code used in the scene, or you can remove all access to the scene from within the game. The former often takes a lot of effort, since depending on how the codebase is organised and optimised some things might be used elsewhere as well - so if you just take everything out then you introduce bugs. Alternatively, you can remove the triggers - which takes about five minutes and is guaranteed not to be any trouble - and start removing things later if you're pressed for space. Makes sense, right?
I'm willing to bet my bottom dollar that at some point, someone in Rockstar was seriously considering adding the Hot Coffee minigame - seriously enough that they started coding it. After that, management realised that it would get them an AO rating, so they told the programmers to remove it. The programmers did what they always do when asked to remove a scene - remove all triggers to it in the code. And then a modder found it, and then Rockstar was in a whole world of shit because hey, Rockstar obviously did this on purpose, right?
I take the view that if Rockstar had done it on purpose, they'd have bothered to finish the minigame. And since there's a nice, simple alternative explanation that doesn't rely on anything other than incompetence, by Hanlon's Razor I very much doubt it was intentional.
Sorry, I just see that misconception so often I had to correct it.
That idea has two major problems with it. First, the presence of the snake. The Bible's pretty explicit on the fact that only humans have free will. That implies that the snake does not have free will. That implies that either God is fallible, or that God put the snake there as a test. If God put the snake there as a test, then... Well, frankly he's not fit to be a father. It's not even as though there was anything else around that would prompt Adam and Eve to disobey.
Secondly, that father-son relationship existed with Adam and Eve. So, ignoring the snake for now, maybe he has a right to punish them. And who knows - maybe death is even a fair punishment (although we're stretching the bounds of fairness a bit here). But death and suffering for every single one of their descendants? I mean, even post-Christ, we have to suffer through this life before the afterlife. Frankly, that is the act of a sociopath. I've never even met God, and yet he's punishing me for something I didn't even do?
I don't buy it. As a metaphorical account, it makes at least some degree of sense. As a literal account, it casts God as a monster.
Well, 'pure' omnipotence of the type you describe isn't logically possible. It's not just God who can't make a stone so heavy he can't lift it, it's any omnipotent being that could ever exist. So since that type of omnipotence is impossible, it does kinda make sense to define a new type of omnipotence that reflects the highest level of power that could concievably exist and apply that to God - the ability to do anything logically possible. I mean, face it, it's not exactly a huge restriction.
Of course, then you run into problems like "Can God sin?", "Can God die?" and "Can God lose his divinity?". You can try to fill the gaps by saying that this would be logically impossible as God is a perfect being, but then you realise that an imperfect omnipotent being is therefore more powerful that a perfect omnipotent being. And then you're stuffed... So there are flaws in the idea of omnipotence, but AFAICS they only arise from trying to apply the concept to most (if not all) religions.
Sorry, but as an atheist who knows a bit about Christian doctrine I just need to step in here to correct a couple of points. First off, the commandment "Do not kill" was actually a mistranslation from "Do not murder" (citation here). That doesn't excuse all the acts of genocide and torture committed by God's disciples in the Old Testament by any means, but it makes the contradictions slightly less glaring by implying that necessary killing is OK.
Secondly, "love thy neighbour" in the New Testament was definitely concerned with gentiles as well as Jews. It only meant Jews in the Old Testament (where it originated), though, so I can see where the confusion comes in. But if you actually read the Parable of the Good Samaritan, where Jesus is specifically asked who the "neighbour" is, gave an example in which the neighbour was a Samaritan. Around that time, the Samaritans were hated almost as much as the Romans, and definitely viewed as gentiles.
And finally, a significant proportion of Christians already accept gays and so on - even those who look on homosexuality as a sin. From what I've seen, the US seems to be anomalous in that it still has quite a lot of fundamentalist loonies, but over in Europe Christians tend to be pretty nice people. In England, for example, the debates over homosexuality tend to be focused more over whether or not they should be allowed to be clergymen within specific sects (by the sects themselves, not by law) rather than whether or not they should be allowed to exist.
I'm not saying Christianity is accurate, but I don't like seeing bad arguments against it either - it perpetuates the belief that all arguments against Christianity's truth are bad.
Sorry, had to jump in here - you can't actually configure screensavers in GNOME any more. Nope. Too complicated. You just get to choose one, and if you want to tinker beyond that - even to change the scrolling text to something other than "Default" - well, I hope you know where the config files are. After all, "screensavers that require configuration are inherently broken" (pretty much a direct quote from the gnome-screensaver developer).
I swear to god that everything I have just written is true. Google gnome-screensaver configuration if you don't believe me. I'm an Ubuntu user, so I'm a little bitter here - the devs recently migrated from xscreensaver to this pile of crap, so now I have to break various aspects of my desktop by removing it and reinstalling x.:-( Rant over.
I think you may possibly be confusing libertarianism with objectivism. They have similar philosophical roots, but quite different viewpoints. Their similarity is essentially in the fact that they believe all people should be free. The difference is in how they define "free". As an aside, the US Libertarian party seems to be closer to objectivism than libertarianism - hence a lot of the confusion between the two ideas.
Objectivism is what you're discussing. It holds that by helping another man, you are denying him the ability to help himself and thereby enslaving him. The consequences of this belief are, obviously, a deeply-held opposition to things like welfare and charity. While not entirely without merit in some cases (for example, a man recovering from an illness who may need some incentive to start getting up and enjoying the world again), AFAICS the essential flaw in this ideology is that it assumes that everyone who is in a bad situation can get out of it under their own power. As you rightly point out, this is not the case. It's all very well saying that someone who breaks both his legs and loses his job as a builder should learn a new skill, but how will he eat while he does? What happens if someone is too ill to work and needs money to live? Notwithstanding, for an introduction to objectivism, I'd strongly recommend Terry Goodkind's "Faith of the Fallen". It won't convince you objectivism is right (it didn't me), but it will at least help you see where objectivists are coming from better than Ayn Rand.
Libertarianism is a much milder ideology. You could essentially sum it up with the quote "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins" - that is, it holds that people should be free to do as they wish as long as it doesn't affect the welfare of others. A lot of libertarians for example, myself included, feel that an absolutely free market is actually a very bad idea, because it allows monopolies to form and trample the freedoms of the consumers. Similarly, if you refuse to help someone genuinely in need, you're restricting their freedoms and so you're in the wrong. Essentially, libertarians are strongly against incursions on personal freedoms - like restrictions on pornography and soft drugs, seatbelt laws and so on - but quite moderate economically speaking. For a good introduction to libertarianism in economics, I'd strongly recommend Terry Pratchett's "Going Postal".
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Well, this particular twerp wasn't actually elected. And for what it's worth, Labour's poll numbers are in the low twenties right now. (Besides, if you're an American then you're not really one to talk, now, are you?)
Their policies go far further than that - take a look at their proposed Freedom Bill. They're the only major party worth voting for on civil liberties right now, as far as I can tell.
Most lawsuits against people without serious money don't have a few million in potential damages at stake. Or an army of lawyers backing the plaintiff, with the accompanying promise that even if grandma is innocent the case is going to be dragged out until she's bankrupt. Or the "generous" immediate settlement offer of "only" ten thousand or so. And the justifications tend to pass the laugh test. And I suspect most people would stop at suing one helpless target.
In short, most lawsuits aren't naked extortion on a massive scale. These are.
(Disclaimer: I neither download nor buy, although I find the idea of piracy far more moral than the idea of giving these scumbags a single penny.)
Bullshit. I've seen a lot of people who thought America was losing, saw the amount of damage its presence was causing Iraq, and wanted to pull out and cut losses all round. I haven't seen anyone this side of a straw man who actually wanted Iraq to be a clusterfuck and hundreds of thousands to die just to discredit Bush. This guy, on the other hand, wants a complete economic collapse - which, at the end of the day, would probably have a similar death toll - just to discredit Obama.
On the other hand, pure avian flu wasn't spreading rapidly from human to human. It might be an over-reaction, but I think it's a stretch to call racism the primary motivation. (Of course, I don't live in the US...)
On the other hand, as someone who neither downloads nor buys, I'd say it's more moral to pirate than give those thieving bastards a single cent. So while a total boycott is the ideal solution (if only to deny them their nice shiny piracy statistics as a justification for lost sales), if people are going to give in and get the music then I'd rather they... well, not buy it!
No, max(author's lifetime, 25 years) would be reasonable. Just because since there are a few cases in which extending copyright past the author's death is justifiable doesn't mean it's still justifiable when the author has already profited from their work for seventy years.
Actually, it's none of the above - the queen specifically asked for the iPod (see here). I agree it would be nice to force the RIAA into commenting on legality, though.
Riposte is that every single Republican was happy with this "compromise", while the majority of Democrats were against it. There's a difference between compromise and unconditional surrender.
Hmm... I seem to remember seeing the figures for the total donations to his campaign from PAC members somewhere or other. It came to a couple of hundred thousand dollars out of a couple of hundred million - it was a pretty insignificant proportion. So it doesn't seem to be a viable loophole, and I'm not terribly upset with him.
Access to a lawyer? A fair trial? Humane conditions? A fixed sentence if found guilty, with freedom at the end? That sounds like a good start...
The essential problem is that Guantanamo is not in any way a normal jail. If it were, far fewer people would be complaining (and then only about the child soldiers).
Just to clear up a couple of points:
/really/ isn't entrapment - the student was in the UK. It would have been entrapment if the material had been hosted on a UK government website, or if he'd been arrested by the US government.
1. It
2. The government didn't actually notice the material being downloaded - we don't allow that sort of thing without a warrant (yet). The guy asked the sysadmin to print it for him because he couldn't afford the ink (1500 pages), and the sysadmin agreed. Then someone in the university noticed it on the sysadmin's computer and went to the police. No spying was involved, just your friendly neighbourhood curtain-twitcher.
That said, this is fucking ridiculous. What's worse is that since Gordon Brown doesn't resemble a cartoon supervillain to the degree that George Bush does, Labour actually has a decent shot in the next election...
He used to be an amateur boxer, though, which makes him considerably tougher than the average Internet critic.
Yay for ad hominem attacks! Seriously, read the post - it makes some good points. I game with a bow ranger, a blood magus (weak prestige class for a wizard), a cleric, a rogue and a half-giant psychic warrior. I'm a warblade. In terms of damage, at around 12th level the psychic warrior is doing less damage than an equivalent level barbarian would, and hitting less often (he has a cleric's BAB), but with a few nifty powers to make up for it. That's not really what I'd call broken. It's possible there might be some broken builds out there that use the XPH, but let's face it - if you know what you're doing, you can make something /horribly/ broken just using Core. (CoDzilla, anyone?) The more important thing is that the average character is non-broken.
I'm doing a Computer Science degree in Cambridge (world ranking university, partnered with MIT). I'm getting top grades. That didn't mean terribly much to me, either - I understood the second sentence, but not the first. Granted I'm only in my first year, but the point here is that "Computer Science" != "Training to become a Linux sysadmin", and expertise in the former does not somehow confer expertise in the latter (although it makes it much easier to acquire).
Understanding the concepts behind algorithmic complexity and programming in general won't tell you anything about the specifics of shell scripting, any more than a deep understanding of C will give you the ability to code in FORTRAN without having some idea of the syntax.
So on average just under a cable a week? Compared to five cables in one week, in the same region, which happens to be one the US is nearly at war with. I'd still call that at least a fairly major coincidence.
Um... Those "cluster problems" on the video? They're easily the most efficient way of doing non-trivial mental arithmetic. (I'm a maths undergrad in Cambridge [UK] and they're the method I use.) Try doing 44*97 in your head with the standard algorithm, then try reducing it mentally to (50-6)*(100-3) = 5000-600-150+18 = 4268, and you'll see what I mean. I've /never/ run into problems with a proof due to an inability to do mental arithmetic.
The standard method, by contrast, is effectively useless in the modern age. It fails horribly for mental arithmetic, it teaches students nothing about the nature of mathematics, and when was the last time you had to work something out on pencil and paper?
Um... No. My defense relies on the game developers being kept uninformed by incompetent management and/or an incompetent legal department. That is, the game developers were told "OK, we're not doing Hot Coffee any more", rather than "OK, the ESRB is going to give us an AO rating if we keep Hot Coffee in there, so wipe out every trace of it." Probably because the managers concerned weren't programmers and had no idea how the programmers would handle things. And it's not a matter of the coders not being able to remove the minigame, it's a matter of it being one hell of a lot easier not to remove it, and the coders not realising that the ESRB would come down on Rockstar if someone made a mod to unlock it. I mean, frankly under the circumstances I wouldn't have expected the ESRB to come down on Rockstar were it not for the baying of the mob - after all, if little Timmy has the technical knowhow to download and install Hot Coffee, then little Timmy has the technical knowhow to browse pornography online to his heart's desire. Basically, you seem to be portraying this as a vast conspiracy that goes right the way to the top. It isn't. It's a miscommunication among people around the middle and bottom.
Easter eggs are totally different. Easter eggs are accessible in-game through an obscure sequence of in-game actions, and are intended to be very difficult to find. The content in Easter eggs is always a part of the finished product - it's of a quality the producer would be happy for the public to see. And they're ultimately accessible in-game, and sooner or later someone will find them and broadcast them to the Internet. That's how you hide something you want people to find as a bonus. Likewise, most hidden tracks (except for the ones that are genuine premastering errors) will be found eventually by people playing the CD normally. They don't stop the player after the "last" track, and the hidden track is revealed, or the hidden track is only accessible when the CD is played on a computer. Stuff like that. Again, the hidden tracks are of commercial quality - they're not filled with ambient noise and they don't have half the instruments missing.
What I am talking about, however, is content that cannot be accessed - even with in-game cheats - until you actually go in and start randomly changing values in memory. That's the sort of thing that can and does screw up your saves. They tend to be found a year or more after the game's release, if at all, and knowledge of their existence tends to be restricted to a very small number of people (with the exception of Hot Coffee). There's a lot of 'removed' content in Super Smash Bros. Melee, for example, that was only found a few months ago. It also tends to be hopelessly unfinished - the kind of embarassing stuff no sensible producer really wants leaked.
And who says the managers were lying? These are not technical people. They know they told the programmers to remove the minigame, they know the minigame is still there, the programmers try to explain the situation, and the managers come away with the impression that it was t3h h4x0rs and it involved changing the source code. Cue press statement idiocy. But really, there's stupidity and there's stupidity - how dumb would Rockstar have to be to consciously lie about something like that? When the truth will come out in approximately twenty nanoseconds, after the modder explains what he did? Not gonna happen.
And 17 year olds (the game was rated M in the first place) are "kids" now? Yeah... Sure...
Actually, it would be more accurate to say it only failed on the people that have no understanding of how game development really works. Developers do stuff like that all the time. It's standard practice. You just don't hear about it very often because normally the content that gets left in isn't objectionable in any way. Let's take a couple of random examples, off the top of my head. Guitar Hero has two tracks that aren't accessible from within the game, but can be accessed with an Action Replay cartridge (Trippolette and Graveyard Shift). They were cut from the game - maybe due to quality, maybe due to licensing issues, I don't know why - but they're still in there. Final Fantasy VII has a crapload of deleted scenes and FMVs on the discs, all accessible with cheat devices - see here for more info. It's common practice.
So why is it common practice? Well, if you want to remove a scene you have two basic options. You can try to dyke out every single piece of code used in the scene, or you can remove all access to the scene from within the game. The former often takes a lot of effort, since depending on how the codebase is organised and optimised some things might be used elsewhere as well - so if you just take everything out then you introduce bugs. Alternatively, you can remove the triggers - which takes about five minutes and is guaranteed not to be any trouble - and start removing things later if you're pressed for space. Makes sense, right?
I'm willing to bet my bottom dollar that at some point, someone in Rockstar was seriously considering adding the Hot Coffee minigame - seriously enough that they started coding it. After that, management realised that it would get them an AO rating, so they told the programmers to remove it. The programmers did what they always do when asked to remove a scene - remove all triggers to it in the code. And then a modder found it, and then Rockstar was in a whole world of shit because hey, Rockstar obviously did this on purpose, right?
I take the view that if Rockstar had done it on purpose, they'd have bothered to finish the minigame. And since there's a nice, simple alternative explanation that doesn't rely on anything other than incompetence, by Hanlon's Razor I very much doubt it was intentional.
Sorry, I just see that misconception so often I had to correct it.
I'd call the level of reverse engineering/decompilation required to find the variable in the first place pretty extensive work...
Secondly, that father-son relationship existed with Adam and Eve. So, ignoring the snake for now, maybe he has a right to punish them. And who knows - maybe death is even a fair punishment (although we're stretching the bounds of fairness a bit here). But death and suffering for every single one of their descendants? I mean, even post-Christ, we have to suffer through this life before the afterlife. Frankly, that is the act of a sociopath. I've never even met God, and yet he's punishing me for something I didn't even do?
I don't buy it. As a metaphorical account, it makes at least some degree of sense. As a literal account, it casts God as a monster.
Well, 'pure' omnipotence of the type you describe isn't logically possible. It's not just God who can't make a stone so heavy he can't lift it, it's any omnipotent being that could ever exist. So since that type of omnipotence is impossible, it does kinda make sense to define a new type of omnipotence that reflects the highest level of power that could concievably exist and apply that to God - the ability to do anything logically possible. I mean, face it, it's not exactly a huge restriction.
Of course, then you run into problems like "Can God sin?", "Can God die?" and "Can God lose his divinity?". You can try to fill the gaps by saying that this would be logically impossible as God is a perfect being, but then you realise that an imperfect omnipotent being is therefore more powerful that a perfect omnipotent being. And then you're stuffed... So there are flaws in the idea of omnipotence, but AFAICS they only arise from trying to apply the concept to most (if not all) religions.
Secondly, "love thy neighbour" in the New Testament was definitely concerned with gentiles as well as Jews. It only meant Jews in the Old Testament (where it originated), though, so I can see where the confusion comes in. But if you actually read the Parable of the Good Samaritan, where Jesus is specifically asked who the "neighbour" is, gave an example in which the neighbour was a Samaritan. Around that time, the Samaritans were hated almost as much as the Romans, and definitely viewed as gentiles.
And finally, a significant proportion of Christians already accept gays and so on - even those who look on homosexuality as a sin. From what I've seen, the US seems to be anomalous in that it still has quite a lot of fundamentalist loonies, but over in Europe Christians tend to be pretty nice people. In England, for example, the debates over homosexuality tend to be focused more over whether or not they should be allowed to be clergymen within specific sects (by the sects themselves, not by law) rather than whether or not they should be allowed to exist.
I'm not saying Christianity is accurate, but I don't like seeing bad arguments against it either - it perpetuates the belief that all arguments against Christianity's truth are bad.
Sorry, had to jump in here - you can't actually configure screensavers in GNOME any more. Nope. Too complicated. You just get to choose one, and if you want to tinker beyond that - even to change the scrolling text to something other than "Default" - well, I hope you know where the config files are. After all, "screensavers that require configuration are inherently broken" (pretty much a direct quote from the gnome-screensaver developer).
:-( Rant over.
I swear to god that everything I have just written is true. Google gnome-screensaver configuration if you don't believe me. I'm an Ubuntu user, so I'm a little bitter here - the devs recently migrated from xscreensaver to this pile of crap, so now I have to break various aspects of my desktop by removing it and reinstalling x.
I think you may possibly be confusing libertarianism with objectivism. They have similar philosophical roots, but quite different viewpoints. Their similarity is essentially in the fact that they believe all people should be free. The difference is in how they define "free". As an aside, the US Libertarian party seems to be closer to objectivism than libertarianism - hence a lot of the confusion between the two ideas.
Objectivism is what you're discussing. It holds that by helping another man, you are denying him the ability to help himself and thereby enslaving him. The consequences of this belief are, obviously, a deeply-held opposition to things like welfare and charity. While not entirely without merit in some cases (for example, a man recovering from an illness who may need some incentive to start getting up and enjoying the world again), AFAICS the essential flaw in this ideology is that it assumes that everyone who is in a bad situation can get out of it under their own power. As you rightly point out, this is not the case. It's all very well saying that someone who breaks both his legs and loses his job as a builder should learn a new skill, but how will he eat while he does? What happens if someone is too ill to work and needs money to live? Notwithstanding, for an introduction to objectivism, I'd strongly recommend Terry Goodkind's "Faith of the Fallen". It won't convince you objectivism is right (it didn't me), but it will at least help you see where objectivists are coming from better than Ayn Rand.
Libertarianism is a much milder ideology. You could essentially sum it up with the quote "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins" - that is, it holds that people should be free to do as they wish as long as it doesn't affect the welfare of others. A lot of libertarians for example, myself included, feel that an absolutely free market is actually a very bad idea, because it allows monopolies to form and trample the freedoms of the consumers. Similarly, if you refuse to help someone genuinely in need, you're restricting their freedoms and so you're in the wrong. Essentially, libertarians are strongly against incursions on personal freedoms - like restrictions on pornography and soft drugs, seatbelt laws and so on - but quite moderate economically speaking. For a good introduction to libertarianism in economics, I'd strongly recommend Terry Pratchett's "Going Postal".