What exactly counts as "serious" literature, praytell? Did God descend from on-high to tell you or some special cadre of literary scholars which books are acceptable and which are rot? I'm rather cool on Dan Brown and I'm frankly a bit scared to crack open Fifty Shades of Greybut I don't begrudge people wanting to read them. Simply not my tastes. I also have a sneaking suspicion we keep re-reading the same "classic" writers mostly out of tradition, even though their art is really not that high. Shakespeare, for instance, draws much of his comedy from fart jokes, fat jokes, synonyms for "penis", and the sit-com circumstances so widely derided by TV critics. His histories are fairly politically-charged as well, suited to fit the tastes of the ruling regents at the time.
That's just the thing. No one really worries about this stuff until if affects them directly.
Of course the cynical part of me says that if the Germans had the same capabilities (and who's to say they don't?) they'd be just as curious to know what President Obama is up to.
As I understand it all "flat" taxes (sales tax, gas tax, %taxes on luxury goods or vices) are regressive in some form or fashion. In all seriousness, I'm not certain how to get around that without every retailer knowing your income bracket at the time-of-sale or getting rid of anything but income and property taxes. Would a Slashdotter with a better knowledge and understanding of economics enlighten me?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the federal government shoulder some of that burden through funding for Interstate repairs and the like? I'm genuinely curious, as I live on the opposite side of the country. If I pay federal taxes haven't I then paid my "fair share" as you call it? It seems to me that this sort of thing would drive down tourism in the long run, as well.
Yeah, I have no great love for these guys either but please at least get the facts right. This isn't a budget deficit fight, this is about a faction of the right-wingers trying desperately to keep the ACA from existing.
You do realize that "Non-Essential" is internally determined by each department, right? The only guideline they have is "personnel essential to protection of life and property."
Actually, yes, through a quirk of the Constitution the clowns in D.C. are indeed getting paid.The 27th Amendment prohibits changes to Congressional salaries from taking effect until the next election. The original intent was to keep Congress from voting itself a raise, but according to some legal experts it means we can't stop paying them either.
FINCH: "No photos online and nothing on the social networking sites."
REESE: "I've never understood why people put all their information on those sites. Used to make our job a lot easier in the C.I.A."
FINCH: "Of course, that's why I created them."
REESE: "You're telling me you invented online social networking, Finch?"
FINCH: "The Machine needed more information. People's social graph, their associations. The government have been trying to figure it out for years. Turns out most people were happy to volunteer it. Business wound up being quite profitable, too"
At this point I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps Person of Interest wasn't created by the NSA as a smoke-screen for their reconaissance activities. Is there any mention in Snowden's letters of a little man with a limp wearing glasses?
And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die." Genesis 2:16-17, New International Translation
The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'" Genesis 3:2-2, New International Translation
Perhaps not an innate understanding, but according to Christian Scriptures Adam and Eve both understood the prohibition God put in place and the consequences for breaking it.
This will be my last post under this thread, as the point of my original comment was not to start a religious debate but to point out a commonly-held misconception about Christian doctrine.
Again, not quite right. According to the Christian Scriptures, God made man in His own image (Gen 1:26), i.e. perfect and with free-will. Adam and Eve exercised that free-will to disobey and thus introduced spiritual sin into humanity. Of course this introduces the question of why a perfect God would give humanity the opportunity to sin. Then again, to paraphrase from Alpha Centauri, the bigger conundrum is why a perfect God creates a universe at all.
Not quite right. According to canonical Christian scriptures, God requires perfect sinlessness. The damnation comes because we are imperfect, i.e., sinners. The point of the crucifiction and resurrection was Christ acting as a substitute for the sins of humanit, defeating death, and ascending to heaven as a mediator between God and humanity. Since the price for imperfection had already been paid, those who accept it are freed from damnation. The book of Romans in the New Testament lays it all out.
In your defense however, Western Christianity, particularly American Christianity, has a tendency to forget that and uses Scripture as political football (normally conservative but there is a growing liberal evangelical movement) or completely waters down the message of crucifiction in favor of therapeutic sermons and feel-good platitudes. I expect most people, even in the church, don't truly understand what Christian Scriptures actually teach.
Biological weapons (not including certainly obscenely-complex biologically-derived toxins) are actually pretty easy to reproduce, depending on the agent. Viral agents can be manufactured in the same apparatus used for making vaccines. Bacterial agents can be cultured in a home-made hot-house using eggs. However the same scaling and weaponizing problems you mentioned for chemical agents apply here two.
If you're interested in the subject, I highly recommend Biohazard by Ken Alibeck. It discusses the history of Soviet biological weapons programs during the later part of the Cold War.
From what I've read cultists also seriously kludged their deployment resulting in a good bit of the gas ending up in the ventilation shafts rather than in the subway tunnels.
Unless I'm misremembering, the Zimmerman telegram was real. I think, dear AC, you are confusing the Zimmerman telegram with the USS Maine incident prior to the Spanish-American war.
A few years ago, I spent about 9 months working a fairly rural section of Missouri.* I'm white and my supervisor was a very dark-skinned black man. We got to talking about fishing and I casually suggested a few fishing spots in the more remote areas. My supervisor very calmly looked at me and said "You're white. You can go anywhere you like around here. I'm a black man in Missouri. There are just certain places I don't go for my own safety."
If these kinds of app provide data on racially-motivate crimes (anyone out there who uses them to shed more light on this?) it would go a long way to helping minorities avoid areas where they might find themselves in trouble with the law by virtue of not being white. It also might give them a better sense of security going into areas they might not normally frequent.
*The town I worked in had a population of about 4500 and I lived 30 minutes up the road in town of 1500. There was a college town of about 20,000 about 30 minutes east by highway. From the town I worked in it was 2 hours in either direction to a major population center.
I agree with most of what you say, but I do want to point out that robocallers are still the most effective means of direct communication with parents in low-income / below-the-poverty-line neighborhoods. In college I volunteered my Saturdays working with kids in a particularly poor neighborhood of the city.* Every household had at least one cellphone with a basic plan (calls and text messages, no Internet access) so parents could either get in contact with their employer or go job-hunting, but most households couldn't afford Internet access. The local public library branch had Internet access but it was limited to an hour per patron per day and most parents could only make it over there once a week, if that. Most of the parents held service jobs such as janitorial work or day-laborer construction so Internet access at work wasn't a given. Robocallers in such areas are more reliable that hoping the parents make it over to their local civic-center or library this week to see what's up at their child's school. Now, could the schools structure their robocaller messages more effectively? Certainly. But the technology itself still as a place for the time being.
*San Antonio TX. 2008-2010. As an illustration, at the time statistically 1 out of 4 kids were almost entirely reliant on the school system for their meals. This means they ate two meals a day at the school cafeteria, breakfast and lunch, and went to bed without dinner. They went without any kind of substantial nourishment (maybe a bag of chips on Saturday) between lunch-time Friday and breakfast Monday morning.
[ / off-topic rant]
I've been seeing this attitude more and more in the Ask Slashdot submission. "Why are you asking questions? Why aren't you researching everything there is to know about $SUBMISSIONTOPIC on your own?" I don't understand why it's such a big deal for someone to ask a question. Asking other people for advice is not a weakness. It's a recognition that no one person can obtain all the world's knowledg on their own. By asking like-minded people for advice, the submitter gets starting points for jumping off into his own research.
For a community of people who bemoan people not taking the time to ask questions, we sure do bitch about it when they do.
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly counts as "serious" literature, praytell? Did God descend from on-high to tell you or some special cadre of literary scholars which books are acceptable and which are rot? I'm rather cool on Dan Brown and I'm frankly a bit scared to crack open Fifty Shades of Greybut I don't begrudge people wanting to read them. Simply not my tastes.
I also have a sneaking suspicion we keep re-reading the same "classic" writers mostly out of tradition, even though their art is really not that high. Shakespeare, for instance, draws much of his comedy from fart jokes, fat jokes, synonyms for "penis", and the sit-com circumstances so widely derided by TV critics. His histories are fairly politically-charged as well, suited to fit the tastes of the ruling regents at the time.
That's just the thing. No one really worries about this stuff until if affects them directly. Of course the cynical part of me says that if the Germans had the same capabilities (and who's to say they don't?) they'd be just as curious to know what President Obama is up to.
As I understand it all "flat" taxes (sales tax, gas tax, %taxes on luxury goods or vices) are regressive in some form or fashion. In all seriousness, I'm not certain how to get around that without every retailer knowing your income bracket at the time-of-sale or getting rid of anything but income and property taxes. Would a Slashdotter with a better knowledge and understanding of economics enlighten me?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the federal government shoulder some of that burden through funding for Interstate repairs and the like? I'm genuinely curious, as I live on the opposite side of the country. If I pay federal taxes haven't I then paid my "fair share" as you call it? It seems to me that this sort of thing would drive down tourism in the long run, as well.
You go onto the internet to look for .... Oooh shiny thing
I just logged on to check the weather. That was twelve years ago...
I'll believe that when I can have a corporation executed.
Yeah, I have no great love for these guys either but please at least get the facts right. This isn't a budget deficit fight, this is about a faction of the right-wingers trying desperately to keep the ACA from existing.
You do realize that "Non-Essential" is internally determined by each department, right? The only guideline they have is "personnel essential to protection of life and property."
Actually, yes, through a quirk of the Constitution the clowns in D.C. are indeed getting paid.The 27th Amendment prohibits changes to Congressional salaries from taking effect until the next election. The original intent was to keep Congress from voting itself a raise, but according to some legal experts it means we can't stop paying them either.
Why get upset with the Congresscritters who created this whole debacle when we can bitch about those evil military people who drob bombs on orphans?
FINCH: "No photos online and nothing on the social networking sites."
REESE: "I've never understood why people put all their information on those sites. Used to make our job a lot easier in the C.I.A."
FINCH: "Of course, that's why I created them."
REESE: "You're telling me you invented online social networking, Finch?"
FINCH: "The Machine needed more information. People's social graph, their associations. The government have been trying to figure it out for years. Turns out most people were happy to volunteer it. Business wound up being quite profitable, too"
At this point I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps Person of Interest wasn't created by the NSA as a smoke-screen for their reconaissance activities. Is there any mention in Snowden's letters of a little man with a limp wearing glasses?
Considering their project is essentially a way to get poor people to eat bugs, I'd say that's right on par with the average MBA's view of humanity.
And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die." Genesis 2:16-17, New International Translation
The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'" Genesis 3:2-2, New International Translation
Perhaps not an innate understanding, but according to Christian Scriptures Adam and Eve both understood the prohibition God put in place and the consequences for breaking it.
This will be my last post under this thread, as the point of my original comment was not to start a religious debate but to point out a commonly-held misconception about Christian doctrine.
Again, not quite right. According to the Christian Scriptures, God made man in His own image (Gen 1:26), i.e. perfect and with free-will. Adam and Eve exercised that free-will to disobey and thus introduced spiritual sin into humanity. Of course this introduces the question of why a perfect God would give humanity the opportunity to sin. Then again, to paraphrase from Alpha Centauri, the bigger conundrum is why a perfect God creates a universe at all.
Not quite right. According to canonical Christian scriptures, God requires perfect sinlessness. The damnation comes because we are imperfect, i.e., sinners. The point of the crucifiction and resurrection was Christ acting as a substitute for the sins of humanit, defeating death, and ascending to heaven as a mediator between God and humanity. Since the price for imperfection had already been paid, those who accept it are freed from damnation. The book of Romans in the New Testament lays it all out. In your defense however, Western Christianity, particularly American Christianity, has a tendency to forget that and uses Scripture as political football (normally conservative but there is a growing liberal evangelical movement) or completely waters down the message of crucifiction in favor of therapeutic sermons and feel-good platitudes. I expect most people, even in the church, don't truly understand what Christian Scriptures actually teach.
Biological weapons (not including certainly obscenely-complex biologically-derived toxins) are actually pretty easy to reproduce, depending on the agent. Viral agents can be manufactured in the same apparatus used for making vaccines. Bacterial agents can be cultured in a home-made hot-house using eggs. However the same scaling and weaponizing problems you mentioned for chemical agents apply here two. If you're interested in the subject, I highly recommend Biohazard by Ken Alibeck. It discusses the history of Soviet biological weapons programs during the later part of the Cold War.
From what I've read cultists also seriously kludged their deployment resulting in a good bit of the gas ending up in the ventilation shafts rather than in the subway tunnels.
Or west Texas for that matter. It's so damn empty out there the state troopers just nod at you when you zip by at 100+ on the back-roads.
Citation?
Unless I'm misremembering, the Zimmerman telegram was real. I think, dear AC, you are confusing the Zimmerman telegram with the USS Maine incident prior to the Spanish-American war.
My point was that we should remeber the "lack" of integration in communities can't simply be chalked up to a nation-wide "white flight" pandemic.
A few years ago, I spent about 9 months working a fairly rural section of Missouri.* I'm white and my supervisor was a very dark-skinned black man. We got to talking about fishing and I casually suggested a few fishing spots in the more remote areas. My supervisor very calmly looked at me and said "You're white. You can go anywhere you like around here. I'm a black man in Missouri. There are just certain places I don't go for my own safety."
If these kinds of app provide data on racially-motivate crimes (anyone out there who uses them to shed more light on this?) it would go a long way to helping minorities avoid areas where they might find themselves in trouble with the law by virtue of not being white. It also might give them a better sense of security going into areas they might not normally frequent.
*The town I worked in had a population of about 4500 and I lived 30 minutes up the road in town of 1500. There was a college town of about 20,000 about 30 minutes east by highway. From the town I worked in it was 2 hours in either direction to a major population center.
I agree with most of what you say, but I do want to point out that robocallers are still the most effective means of direct communication with parents in low-income / below-the-poverty-line neighborhoods. In college I volunteered my Saturdays working with kids in a particularly poor neighborhood of the city.* Every household had at least one cellphone with a basic plan (calls and text messages, no Internet access) so parents could either get in contact with their employer or go job-hunting, but most households couldn't afford Internet access. The local public library branch had Internet access but it was limited to an hour per patron per day and most parents could only make it over there once a week, if that. Most of the parents held service jobs such as janitorial work or day-laborer construction so Internet access at work wasn't a given. Robocallers in such areas are more reliable that hoping the parents make it over to their local civic-center or library this week to see what's up at their child's school. Now, could the schools structure their robocaller messages more effectively? Certainly. But the technology itself still as a place for the time being.
*San Antonio TX. 2008-2010. As an illustration, at the time statistically 1 out of 4 kids were almost entirely reliant on the school system for their meals. This means they ate two meals a day at the school cafeteria, breakfast and lunch, and went to bed without dinner. They went without any kind of substantial nourishment (maybe a bag of chips on Saturday) between lunch-time Friday and breakfast Monday morning.
[ / off-topic rant] I've been seeing this attitude more and more in the Ask Slashdot submission. "Why are you asking questions? Why aren't you researching everything there is to know about $SUBMISSIONTOPIC on your own?" I don't understand why it's such a big deal for someone to ask a question. Asking other people for advice is not a weakness. It's a recognition that no one person can obtain all the world's knowledg on their own. By asking like-minded people for advice, the submitter gets starting points for jumping off into his own research. For a community of people who bemoan people not taking the time to ask questions, we sure do bitch about it when they do.
I can't tell if you're serious or just an exquisite troll.