Um, if you want US dollars, you can buy it with your own currency through a foreign exchange market. That's what I do.
Sure, but I'm talking about countries, not about individuals.
You, as an individual, can exchange some amount of your currency for US dollars only because there is something your country produces that Americans want to buy. At some point in the market there are producers in your country who won't sell for anything except your local currency, since that's what they must use to pay their employees' wages, their corporative taxes etc. Thus, for Americans to get these goods, they need to purchase first the local currency. The currency exchange rate between the US dollar and your local currency arises precisely from this ratio between goods purchasable exclusively in one currency, not the other.
If there were a country with zero need for made in USA products, whose production in turn were of no interest for any American, and which also did no business with any other country doing business with the USA (including OPEC), then this country's currency would have no exchange rate with the US dollar, and you wouldn't be able to purchase US dollars with your currency, no matter how many of it you had. Such a rate would simply not exist.
You, as an individual, is limited in your exchange ability by the production of goods and paper money in both countries. A foreign exchange market is an effect of a much more basic set of conditions, not something that exists all by itself.
IANAL (nor a programmer), but this is what I've heard and read many times on these same questions:
1. Can I do it with Linux today (GPL2) and tomorrow (GPL3)?
A.: Yes, and yes.
2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.)
A.: Depends on the library. Some allow it, some don't. As a rule of thumb, if the library is licensed as GPL (any version), don't do it. But to be absolutely sure, read the license anyway. Some authors make changes to these default licenses allowing or prohibiting specific things.
3. Can I obfuscate my code (e.g. encode it)?
A.: Yes, but I don't see the point. It's akin to lock mechanisms or game protection: anyone wishing to reverse engineer the binary will do so no matter how much obfuscation you put into either the source code or the compiled output itself. See for example FreeDOS, which reverse engineered Microsoft DOS, or the Wine and ReactOS projects, which are reverse engineering Windows itself! Adding these security measures has only one practical effect: to make your software slower. No actual benefits, at all.
This is also a reason for you to not worry that much with your source code being published or not. Either your software is so valuable that it'll get reverse engineered anyway, or it's almost useless outside a niche market and as a result no one will be interested in reimplementing it no matter how much you post and repost the whole source tree all over the Internet. Besides, copyright laws already provide you full protection. If you in your license don't allow neither redistribution nor derivative works, both redistribution and deriving is forbidden no matter how many people can read your source code. Microsoft itself shows lots of its code to 3rd parties, but no one among those can use if for anything. It remains the sole property of Microsoft.
4. Could I be forced to publish this code by some 3-d party?
A.: If you follow "2" carefully, no. Otherwise, if you make a dumb choice of linked library, yes.
5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?
A.: Doesn't make a difference, since you must follow "2" anyway. What if that specific library you're statically linking into your compiled software isn't actually under BSD, but under something else? The best thing is to always read the license.
In any and all cases (and I mean it! GPL, BSD, Windows or whatever, doesn't matter) consult a lawyer if you have any doubt. Legal counseling is expensive for a reason.;)
These will likely be in the form of toll booths, since that would probably be the cheapest way of enforcement.
I don't think it'll be booths. More probably some kind of RF card read by cheap sensors all around roads and even small street cities, with you receiving a bill at the month's end. This and probably some kind of pre-paid card also, which those more privacy conscious would prefer. Pass in front of a sensor without a valid card (or with no card at all) and see the red light of a police car behind you in no time.
I've posted the text below to today's thread on vegetable oil, but I think it's relevant for this thread, so here goes a copy:
The actual reason your (I'm Brazilian) government doesn't do this [the message I was replying to suggested USA simply stopped using foreign fuels] isn't because of oil itself. It's because it has since the 1970s a deal with OPEC by which all OPEC countries would accept only US dollars as payment for their oil, no matter who was purchasing it.
Now think about it: Germany, Brazil, China etc. want to purchase oil. Their currency isn't US dollar, it's something else. So, they must first acquire US dollars, and then use these dollars to purchase the oil. How do they do obtain US dollars? Well, the US government doesn't give US dollars to other countries for free, to get some they must sell goods to USA. At good prices, mind you, otherwise Americans won't purchase their goods, but those sold by some other country.
All these countries get the US dollars they need to purchase oil. But not only this amount. Imagine what would happen if for some reason Americans slowed down the purchase of their goods? No US dollars, no oil. Pretty bad, eh? So, all countries build reserves with billions of US dollars, as a way to purchase oil when and if the need arises. Now, obviously, some of these US dollars do come back to USA, otherwise USA would have no exports at all. OPEC countries, for instance, import lots of things from USA. They have tons of US dollars available due to only accepting this as a means of payment. Even so, though, most of these US dollars remain outside USA. Everyone has it, and everyone needs it, so other countries also allow exchanging goods among themselves using US dollars.
Now, US dollars reserves in foreign countries, as well as foreign exchange of goods using US dollars, both cause one important effect, more important than the above mentioned cheap import goods: less US dollars inside USA. And less dollars inside USA equals low inflation. In other words, this system allows USA to export its inflation to other countries, so that Americans themselves don't feel it. Were all the US dollars abroad come back to USA, and USA would feel a recessive inflation so extreme that 1929 would pale in comparison.
So, as I said in the beginning, the problems isn't oil itself. It's the money supply. Were OPEC to begin accepting other currencies, all these US dollars floating outside USA would be far less needed, thus starting to flow back into USA. And, guess what? Some months before USA deciding to wage war on Iraq, Saddam Hussein had decided to accept other currencies. Recently Iran has also shown interest in doing so. And what we began to hear? That USA is thinking about waging war on Iran.
So, don't be fooled. No matter whether the government is Republican or Democrat, any President of the USA will do the exact same thing. Because not doing, by allowing OPEC to accept other currencies, will mean years or even decades of extreme suffering to the American people. And no one has any idea how to solve the problem by any means other than bullying OPEC countries into conformance.
On the other hand, China, Russia, the European Union, all of them hate this system, because it ties their development to whatever is happening inside USA. And all of them would love to have their currencies among those accepted by OPEC countries, for this would yield them the same benefits USA have: inflation export and direct, non-USA dollar backed, cheap goods imports from all those countries who would need to build reserves of their currencies.
Do you smell 3rd World War on the air? I do. In a few years, decades if we're lucky, at everyone's backyard.
[PS for this statistics thread: if you consider that the actual goal is to stop OPEC countries from accepting currencies other than the US dollar, then so far it's being successful. Maybe not 100% so, but nevertheless more than if there were no war. Add this consideration to the statistical analysis and I bet its result would be very different.]
The actual reason your (I'm Brazilian) government doesn't do this isn't because of oil itself. It's because it has since the 1970s a deal with OPEC by which all OPEC countries would accept only US dollars as payment for their oil, no matter who was purchasing it.
Now think about it: Germany, Brazil, China etc. want to purchase oil. Their currency isn't US dollar, it's something else. So, they must first acquire US dollars, and then use these dollars to purchase the oil. How do they do obtain US dollars? Well, the US government doesn't give US dollars to other countries for free, to get some they must sell goods to USA. At good prices, mind you, otherwise Americans won't purchase their goods, but those sold by some other country.
All these countries get the US dollars they need to purchase oil. But not only this amount. Imagine what would happen if for some reason Americans slowed down the purchase of their goods? No US dollars, no oil. Pretty bad, eh? So, all countries build reserves with billions of US dollars, as a way to purchase oil when and if the need arises. Now, obviously, some of these US dollars do come back to USA, otherwise USA would have no exports at all. OPEC countries, for instance, import lots of things from USA. They have tons of US dollars available due to only accepting this as a means of payment. Even so, though, most of these US dollars remain outside USA. Everyone has it, and everyone needs it, so other countries also allow exchanging goods among themselves using US dollars.
Now, US dollars reserves in foreign countries, as well as foreign exchange of goods using US dollars, both cause one important effect, more important than the above mentioned cheap import goods: less US dollars inside USA. And less dollars inside USA equals low inflation. In other words, this system allows USA to export its inflation to other countries, so that Americans themselves don't feel it. Were all the US dollars abroad come back to USA, and USA would feel a recessive inflation so extreme that 1929 would pale in comparison.
So, as I said in the beginning, the problems isn't oil itself. It's the money supply. Were OPEC to begin accepting other currencies, all these US dollars floating outside USA would be far less needed, thus starting to flow back into USA. And, guess what? Some months before USA deciding to wage war on Iraq, Saddam Hussein had decided to accept other currencies. Recently Iran has also shown interest in doing so. And what we began to hear? That USA is thinking about waging war on Iran.
So, don't be fooled. No matter whether the government is Republican or Democrat, any President of the USA will do the exact same thing. Because not doing, by allowing OPEC to accept other currencies, will mean years or even decades of extreme suffering to the American people. And no one has any idea how to solve the problem by any means other than bullying OPEC countries into conformance.
On the other hand, China, Russia, the European Union, all of them hate this system, because it ties their development to whatever is happening inside USA. And all of them would love to have their currencies among those accepted by OPEC countries, for this would yield them the same benefits USA have: inflation export and direct, non-USA dollar backed, cheap goods imports from all those countries who would need to build reserves of their currencies.
Do you smell 3rd World War on the air? I do. In a few years, decades if we're lucky, at everyone's backyard.
Then the more sensible thing to do is to change the system so that you only pay for the amount of road you use, not the amount of fuel. Some cars use few fuel, others use lots, but if in doing so both "consume" the exact same 'n' miles of road, why should they pay different amounts for the privilege? A broad (while simple to use) toll system by which you were "taxed" some cents for every mile of paved road you actually traveled would be the ideal solution. Anything else seems distorted.
I wish governments and big business on *both* sides of the border would devote as much attention, time and money to the issue of illegal handgun imports into Canada as they do about movie piracy.
The solution is to make it legal, as well as reasonably easy to get a handgun. Do some psychological test, require some training, issue a certificate and allow people who have it to purchase guns. The more law-abiding armed people who know how to use a gun you have in your streets, the more risky it will be for a thief to act on any random individual. The more risky it is, the less they'll attempt it. There, problem solved.
Strict gun control laws only work on small countries. The bigger the country is, the easier it is to smuggle illegal weapons into its territory, and the more difficult it is for authority to control what its population is doing. So, above a certain size (dunno what it is, but whatever it is, Canada surely surpasses it by some orders of magnitude), the easiest way to deal with violence is by enabling everyone to practice it, so that everyone controls everyone. Either this, or absolute control with zero privacy. What is better?
This isn't true at all. I run Firefox both in Windows XP and in Ubuntu, and while in Windows everything looks almost perfectly windowish, in Ubuntu some things follow your selected Gnome theme; some can be made to seem they follow it, for example by installing a special Ubuntu theme; and some, such as form buttons, look completely wrong, not following the Gnome standard at all and looking more like a poor man version of Windows 2000 buttons.
Proper Gnome integration is something that Firefox still lacks. The same can be said of other widely used Linux applications, such as OpenOffice, who completely ignores your Gnome font rendering settings. There's still a long way to go in this department. Firefox is just one among the many improperly behaving softwares.
Why do you pretend that women are inanimate or nonexistent?
Okay. It's simply: because it doesn't change the conclusion. You see: a woman being a queen, a slave, intelligent, dumb, a political active being with total self-determination and fully equal rights, or a burka-wearing 3rd class citizen in a backward 4th world country, in all cases, an abortion happening before any arbitrarily chosen point at any arbitrarily chosen scale has a 50% chance of either being an assassination, or not. Your demand has, so to speak, no logical meaning.
You can of course argue that, given that an embryo/fetus is growing inside the body of a concrete woman, although killing him being has 50% chance of being an assassination, it is nevertheless worth it. But this does not change the fact that it's a 50% chance. The two lines of argumentation have no direct relation, or contradiction. The fact stays the same no matter what one chooses to do upon it, inside or outside any given legal framework.
Given that I'm advocating a pro-choice point of view, did it take your entire philosophy education to whip that one out? Seriously, what is "but some fetuses are female!" supposed to accomplish? Do you think that I hold an opinion that women have a greater right to their lives than men do? That I want men to die, die, die? What are you getting at?
I think you're misreading what I wrote. My position is purely logical. You can call it "pro-consistency" if you wish. What I'm saying is imply this: that if in all our laws we require a higher level of certainty before taking extreme measures, then either this same principle must hold true for abortion, or we should change the remaining laws so that they work under the same level of reliability that we selected to apply to abortion. Personally I prefer the former. If you wish to give a name to this preference you can call it "pro-strictness", its opposite being then the "pro-strictlessness", or something like that. In any case, neither of these two positions contradict the logical conclusion I've stated. What I'm strongly against is the lack of consistency, the introduction of "exceptions" to the basic framework. And as they stand right now, pro-abortion laws (or judicial decisions) are extremely inconsistent.
In short: make all laws one way, or all laws the other way, not this mix of some laws being one way while others are the other way. And whatever option you choose, accept and adopt all of its logical consequences. Anything else and you're under cognitive dissonance.
There are some things that should never be left up to the free market and this is one of them.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! In a true free market there is no copyright, no patents, no nothing to hinder the free exchange of goods and services between consenting adults. In an actual free market, someone would simply take Monsanto's DRM'ed seeds, strip the DRM out, and start selling the "opensourced" (a.k.a. "generic", a.k.a. "pirated") version, without anyone being able to complain.
What we have nowadays isn't "free market" by any stretch of imagination. It's a market, sure, but very, very far from free.
The GPL3 will cause a GNU/Fork. There is enough money invested in customizing Linux et al that, even if Linux embraces GPL3 wholeheartedly, the non-GPL3'd system will maintain themselves indefinitely.
I see no black and white distinction between reshaping law and the interpretation of law, and merely reshaping law. If we can agree that drug dealing is acceptable, do we need to cleanse society of everyone who shared that sentiment and was unwilling to abide by stupid drug laws in the past?
No, no! You're not taking this from the correct angle. I'm not talking about they merely drug dealing, but about everything else they did while drug dealing for the sake of continuing to drug deal. For example: extortions, assassinations, thefts, putting dangerous venoms inside drugs to better profit etc. Any legalizing effort that doesn't make extremely clear that for these things they did while drug dealing they will still be persecuted and punished, with harsher punishments due to they having committed them in association with drug dealing, fails, because in the end such a legalization would reward them for the most outrageous of their wrongdoings.
I don't think so; evidently you do. Many of the most powerful clans in the U.S. were involved in bootlegging during the prohibition. Where would we be today if those criminals had been executed to make way for the more domesticated businesspeople who were afraid of the law even when it was stupid?
One thing is the guy who simply distilled some spirit. Another is the Al Capone kind who also goes around machine-gunning rivals. You cannot threat both equally when you re-legalize things.
I dispute that dichotomy. As you point out, there is no developmental bright line. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that is difficult to characterize, and impossible to test objectively.
Don't you notice that when you choose consciousness as the delimiting point you're just adding another to the many possible points, and that opting for it is as much arbitrary as opting for any other?
As it stands, your argument, or rather, the meta-structure of your argument, in fact confirms mine, for my argument is precisely about this kind of argumentation, and as such it stands without me needing to actually enter each one of the multitude of discussions on which point is better, worse and why. It works, so to speak, one "abstraction layer" above yours.
The only bright line in sight is the point at which society grants human rights to a developing human. That is entirely arbitrary. Birth works perfectly well, and I see no reason to go screwing with that bright line.
You don't see a reason because it's not your own human status that is being discussed and on the verge of being negated. The logical consequence of your line of reasoning is that, if/when the political line changes and for some arbitrary reason you're no longer thought of as human, thus losing all the human protections that (actual) humans enjoy, this is perfectly okay and you should just accept it, until some day in future when you're thought of as human again. Provided, obviously, you weren't killed by (actual) humans in the meantime, something that by definition wouldn't have been assassination, but at best cruelty to an animal.:D
c) What's ethical in wartime with regard to foreigners is highly subjective. Until we have a one-world government, we have to live with the fact that every person in another country can become "the other" if there's a perceived threat to our national interest.
Hmm... No, I don't think this is correct. There are plenty of "otherization" means under an unified government. USA is the paradigmatic example: it has lots of divisions as things are, even being a single country. Race divisions ("they, the blacks", "they, the whites", "they, the Mexicans", "they, the native Americans"), geographic divisions ("they, the rednecks", "they, the southerners", "they, the northerners"), religious divisions ("they, the atheists", "they, the religious right", "they, the pagans
Yes, that all hangs together quite well. Of course, you have to assume that the fetus sort of hangs suspended in space until the mean ol' abortionist reaches in there with a claw hammer and pulls its little Jesus-lovin' soul out.
Don't assume hidden intentions behind a logical argument. It's either valid or invalid, and if valid, false or true. Psychological reasoning is most of the time subject to error, as unreliable as it can get. For instance, I study Christianity and, as a Philosophy student, have much interest in the Middle Age, but I'm not Christian, and as such, the Jesus-bashing doesn't ring a bell.
It's not like someone has to actually carry the thing around, or undergo significant risk in carrying it to term, or like forced birth ever led to parents resenting their children, sometimes to the point of abusing them.
No, in your world it's a simply choice between a live fetus and a dead fetus, and the inconvenient meatsack that hauls it around for months on end just vanishes from your analysis.
If you wish you can take my previous argument and, if you conclude it's valid, take its conclusion as the main premise, the reality of the mother as the secondary premise, and start analyzing from there. Both approaches aren't opposed, they're complementary. And whatever the dialectical synthesis coming from there is, it's bound to the same prerequisites of logical consistency and rigor. Anything else can be taken as mere rhetorics.
I suppose that's rather telling as to your opinion of women.
Lol. And what your reply says about your opinion of all the (possible) women that are killed just because they're embryos and fetuses?;)
See why this kind of "non-reasoning" doesn't work?
Sorry, but I don't understand the reference. I'm not a native English speaker.
Can this "user friendly" ebook PDF reader be installed on my Linux-powered laptop? Nope. Screw it then, I'll keep buying my tagged-but-DRM-free eBooks from Manning.
I haven't completed my transition from Windows to Linux yet, there are still some thing I must transfer or find replacements for, and this is one of those, but the comments in Wine's applications database for eReader are very positive, so I'm confident I'll be fine.:)
Anyway, I didn't know Manning. Thanks for the link!
I don't hate them due to the drug dealing per se, but due to the crime and violence they used for and while drug dealing. Most of the legalization talk I hear fails to take into account that the former criminal drug dealers must still pay for the violence they did, even if from the moment drugs get legalized they start behaving as honest businessmen. Their previous fortunes were built upon blood, and letting they keep this money is blatant promotion of injustice to both the (new) honest and law abiding drug dealers as well as to the former victims of the criminal ones.
You think when Britain lost the war of Independence, they should have said, "Hey, sorry about that. Just let us execute all those troublemaking Founding Fathers, and then we'll let you run your own country?"
This comparison is unfair for the sole reason that wars (true ones, not cabinet wars) reshape the interpretation of the law as well as, many times, law itself. What happens inside a stable and stably-changing legal framework cannot be easily correlated to what happens outside of any framework and is, most of the time, framework-establishing.
Second) That might make you feel good, but it's mostly useless because it functions as an extremely attenuated deterrent. Nobody thinks they're going to go commit crimes if they take drugs. They take drugs because they like the feeling. The way to prevent drug-induced crimes is to pay attention to other people and intervene if it looks like they're addicted or are getting in over their head.
You're correct in that it alone doesn't work, but it's nevertheless an important and necessary component of any effective deterrent. Drug users will try to drug themselves where there's less chance of doing something stupid. You'd end up with something akin to "drug pubs", not the middle of the street, and that's an improvement any way you look at it.
b) You're grossly misusing probability, and you evidently have never glanced at embryology.
I do know both, yes. All "embryologic starting points" for a human life are indeed arbitrary, just follow the discussion. For some, it's the moment a nervous system becomes discernible. For others, it's the moment a brain appears. For others, it's the moment there's a pulsating hearth, or merely a hearth. For others yet, it's the moment cells have started differentiating, or the moment the differentiation reaches this or that percentage, or such number of cells, or such number of cell divisions. Entering developed fetuses properly, there are those that regard it as the moment it shows voluntary movements, or the moment it has the ability to live by itself outside of the mothers. And so on, and so forth. So much, indeed, that in the end you can have someone arguing with property for it to be set at any specific second in the 23 million or so seconds that the development takes. Choosing any of these is then arbitrary simply because the other 22,999,999 are as much convincing as the one you choose. And no matter which one it is, you are objectively either right, or wrong. Because there's no 1/3, 1/2 or 9/10 human life. There's either an human life, or no human life at all.
You also don't understand that human rights are a societal construct granted to make society function better, not something inherently belonging to human beings.
I talk about human right because I'm talking about a legal framework. Remove the legal framework, and we have what I exposed above: human life or no human life. Thus, either killing a human being (short form: assassinating) or not killing a human being. The fact that the law might concede to some persons the right to assassinate others when there's a 'n%' chance they've made this or that (or be this or that, etc.) is immaterial for this argument.
It comes into play when we're trying to determine what the law ought to be, onc
there are a number of issues where social conservatives have it wrong: marijuana should be legalized, abortion should be an option, physical torture doesn't work, there's nothing wrong with gay marriage, euthanasia is ok if you're sound of mind, etc.
I consider myself a social conservative, but the "conservative" I refer myself to is of the very, very old kind. Meaning, pre-Victorian, pre-puritan, pre-modern, way down into the "Middle Age" kind of conservatism. And according to this conservatism, these are the answers to your points:
a) Marijuana should be legalized.
Yes, and other drugs too, provided three things are also done:
First: Everyone guilt of being in the drug business before legalization should still be prosecuted and incarcerated for doing so according to the previous laws, otherwise all alive drug cartel mafiosi assassins as well as all alive drug-funded guerrilla genocides would, in a matter of days, become legal and respected businessman, instead of psychopaths and sociopaths that should pay for their crimes. A complete new beginning is okay. A pardon for these guys isn't.
Second: Committing crimes while under the influence of a drug should multiply the incarcerated time, as already happens with drinking-influenced crimes.
Third: Tobacco usage should have the same freedom granted to drug usage. There's no reason in being pro-drug and anti-tobacco. Meaning: if it's not admissible for your to sue John Doe for providing you some marijuana he cultivated in his garden, it's not admissible for you to sue a multinational cigarette manufacturer for selling you tobacco.
Anything less and it simply wouldn't be a just move.
b) Abortion should be an option.
No, because there's no certainty whatsoever on when an embryo/fetus becomes a human being with human rights, only arbitrarily chosen points. For any given point in time, there are two possibilities: it's either the correct point, and the thing before that instant isn't a human being, thus having no human rights, thus his demise not being an assassination; or it's the wrong point, and you're indeed assassinating an human being. Since we don't know what's in any point we choose (3 months, 10 days, whatever, it doesn't matter), aborting is an act that always has 50% chance, minimum, of being an assassination. It's simply illogical to freely allow for something with such a high level of uncertainty. Mere common sense, devoid of any religious implication, dictates that in such a case the safe option be chosen, and the only available other option is not killing the embryo/fetus, because only by following it you're 100% sure you didn't commit an assassination.
If you disagree, then you should also follow the logical consequences of your disagreement and, for example, say that a 50% chance of one being guilty of having committed a crime given the collected evidence must be enough for him to be convicted, even when the conviction is the death penalty. If you think the correct in this case is, let's say, at least 99% certainty, the same must apply to abortion. Any divergence in approaches here would be, necessarily, a case of cognitive dissonance.
c) Physical torture doesn't work.
Usually correct. The only exception would be when you're almost 100% sure (see 'b') the victim know something he isn't willing to reveal. And even so, to torture someone would be an ethically valid act only if said knowledge were something that would allow you to immediately avoid worse things than the torture itself to happen, such as, for example, saving lives. Anything less, even possibly saving lives in a few months or years, isn't defensible in any way, shape or form.
d) There's nothing wrong with gay marriage.
The problem is not well exposed. The problem isn't in gay marriage. The problem is in marriage being a civil bound. This is a very recent development in the history of Western law. Up to some point in th
"What would happen if the crew of the NX-01 were anthropomorphic animals and there's maybe a crossover with the X-Men why not?"
Well, not furry (except for some of the X-Men, but that's expected); not the NX-01, but the NCC-1701; and not a fanfic, but an official crossover (!); but here you go.
Apple should have embedded the purchaser's credit card number into the music, then it would very unlikely to be released into the wild! LOL.
Believe it or not, using the credit card number as a copyright violation deterrent is indeed used in some places. Not in any DRM-free file that I know of, but at least on DRM'ed ebooks purchased at eReader, FictionWise and some other stores for use on the eReader and eReader Pro softwares.
The interesting thing is that, although I'm in principle against DRM, the DRM scheme used in these books is so user-friendly that I don't mind purchasing ebooks there at all. You can install the software in as many computers and handhelds you wish and put all your purchased ebooks simultaneously on all of them without any limitation (the same applies to the "Pro" version of the software), and you can copy from the ebook and paste into another application one paragraph at a time, what's more than enough for fair use, since you can do so for as many paragraphs as you wish). The only thing the software lacks is printing, but if you're in ebook reading to begin with that's hardly a problem, and if it at some moment becomes indeed a problem, you can copy/paste your way into paper. For all of this, the unlock code is merely the credit card number you used to purchase the ebook.
I wonder: wouldn't such a DRM scheme work well for music too? Purchase a music, be able to do whatever you want with it, in any device or computer you want, with the only requirement that you fill your credit card number for the music that didn't get automatically unlocked when the software attempted the credit card hashes (of course it should be hashes) already stored on its database. It'd be easy enough for almost no one to care.
Minor correction, the Orthodox do no believe in Limbo or Purgatory. It was strictly a Roman Catholic construct that did not exist there initially. Just because the Greeks had the Elysium Fields doesn't mean the church immediately adopted it.
Actually, neither Heaven nor Hell (and much less their subdivisions) have, in either Orthodox or Catholic churches, any official definition. Both the Bible and the early Christians, including the Church Fathers, provide strong sensory imageries for both "places", but the idea that these were not symbols, but literal expressions, is a very recent and, in fact, heretical concept.
Thus, when preaching to non-Christians and faced with worldviews extremely different from that of a standard Christian, the preacher has usually lots of freedom for "enveloping" the essential teachings into their concepts and language. Saint Paul is the example here, for he had no problem (given due limits, of course) in pointing to a Greek statue and saying "There, that's the god I'm talking about", then proceeding to explain what he means using Greek philosophical concepts (see Acts 17). The transition from Sheol into Hades, the later incorporation of Elysium as Limbo in a "why not?" way, as well as its refusal, are all in line with the ultimate objective of developing, in those who hear, trust in God.
You said it's up to God to decide who goes where. I cannot agree more. But for the same reason, it's up to God to decide on the details. And that's precisely why I also "prefer" (so to speak) the Orthodox church to the Western ones. The Western churches, Catholic and Protestants alike, try excessively to define things, and thus end up fighting over insignificant details. The Orthodox one stopped at the 7th Council and agreed that anything beyond that point is in a permanent "maybe" state. That's as good as it can get, except maybe if you also take into consideration the Coptic church, which stopped at the 4th one.;)
Many people replied with the Christian position on this, so I don't need to address it again. But I must make a small correction to them. When they say that you must have faith on God to get in heaven, and then equate this with "believing" in him, this is incorrect. The reason is philological actually. Faith isn't synonymous to belief. The most appropriate translation for the Latin word fides, from which comes the English faith, is "trust". So, you're not exactly expected to believe in God, meaning to believe he exists and such. You're expected to trust him. Trust that he will do as he said he would.
By the way, the more "down to Earth" reason for you not being able to reach Heaven by merely being a good person is that the Christian Hell is the Greek Hades, literally. According to Greek mythology, dead souls, good and evil alike, went to Hades. Obviously there were different "sections" there for the good and the evil, the place for the good ones being called, if I remember correctly, "Elysium Fields". But good or bad, it still was Hades -- nothing more, nothing less.
Thus, when Christianity began spreading, it hadn't to teach people about the existence of Hades. They simply said something like this:
"Tell me, you do know that you're going to Hades when you die, don't you?"
"Yeah, sure! I hope I end up in Elysium, but yes. Why?"
"Well, have you ever wondered why the gods send you there, instead of inviting you to stay with them at Mount Olympus?"
"Hmm..."
"I'll tell you something that might interest you. There's actually a way to not go into Hades, but to a place so incredible better that even Mount Olympus itself would pale in comparison. Wanna hear about it?"
And so on and so forth.
Belief in the existence of God (or gods), as well as in the positive outcome of being good, were pretty much givens. For Christianity to be distinct it had to preach something very different. That people nowadays don't understand what this distinctiveness was (and still is) pretty much amazes me.:)
PS.: The old Elysium Fields still survives in Orthodox and Catholic Christian cosmogony. It's new name is "Limbo". If you think about Purgatory as the first level of Heaven, Limbo would be the first level of Hell. For those Christians that believe in it (or in both), it would be a seemingly nice place for the very good pagans. But it's nevertheless neither Heaven (properly) nor Purgatory, ranking far, far below both.
William Lind, a scholar on the subject of this new style of war, which he calls "4th Generation of Modern Warfare" (to distinguish it from the other 3 common types of military organization: organized battlefield; top-down order-based hierarchic army; and blitzkrieg) as a shortcut for something that is fast-paced, non-centralized, stateless, guerrilla-based, multi-polar and simultaneously global, international and local, says that the best way for one to defend himself from it is by doing two things:
a) Focus inwardly, trying to be on the smallest possible number of 4GW organization target lists. The less people hate you, the better you are;
b) Focus locally, building your defensive strategy on fast deployed forces stationed where they act and, if possible, made up of residents of the area, as well as lowering the dependency each area has on resources deployed from too much away. The more centralized and distant and your military force is, the weaker you are. The more dependent you are on goods and services coming from other cities, states and countries, the weaker you are. (Note that this isn't the same as neglecting a strong and big army. It's more of the way said army is built.)
USA fails on both aspects. It fails "a" miserably by making its presence felt all over the world, thus entering the list of almost everyone. And it fails "b" by encouraging a false sense of security on its population, when it should be making local militias and weapon usage proficiency as much widespread as possible, as well as by having an absolute, complete, all-embracing dependency on foreign natural resources, goods, services and work.
For the whole world up to the 19th century (or 18th, I'm not sure now), and for part of it still today, there were two, and only two, ages for a person: childhood and adulthood. No middle ground. The precise age varied, but usually a male human was a "boy" until his 13th anniversary, and a "man" afterwards (12th anniversary for females). Did it work? Yes, it did. Marvelously. Faced with adult problems, the "children" of the time matured at an incredibly fast pace.
There were no reasons for things to change, except one: if you accept the invented concept of a middle ground, the so called "adolescence", you are suddenly faced with the "problem" of young adults wanting to act as, well, adults. And how do you "solve" it? Hell, by asking for government regulation, of course! Politicians, who are mad but not dumb, jumped in the bandwagon and devised all sorts of regulation to be applied to "adolescents". After all, why not? More laws always means more power.
The only solution for this kind of BS would be for a complete dismissal of the whole concept. But neither people nor politicians are able to think that much out-of-the-box. For the decades and maybe centuries following us, "adolescence" will still be seen as obviously existing, as will laws regulating it be seen as obviously needed. For a long, long time, those disagreeing with this will be only a minority.
On a side note: the same can be said regarding marriage. For most of human century it wasn't a legal matter. No government had anything to say on it. But this also changed in the 19th century, when some people began demanding for relationships to be regulated. And now we must deal with all the problems resulting from this desire. If the whole idea of civil marriage were dismissed, where would the discussion on the prohibition of polygamy (think Mormons in Utah and Muslims immigrants) be? Where would the recent same-sex marriage discussions be? Nowhere. "Marriage" would remain a purely religious concept, completely ignored by secular governments, who would simply see people living together and sharing property without any interest whatsoever on what they were doing between themselves and in relation to said property. No legal discussion would exist for lack of substance.
But go talk to anyone involved in these disputes that they (all sides: heterosexual monogamous, homosexual monogamous, polygamous etc.!) shouldn't be asking for more government interference in matters of interpersonal relationships, but for less of it, for the elimination of all or almost all laws defining and regulating marriage, and see what happens. Almost no one gets it. Marriage as a legal matter is here to stay, as much as "adolescence".
Those who know better? Their only option is to endure the whole madness. Sad, but true...
I think it's about time for someone to develop a "MergeNews" Firefox addon. You load an article in a known news source that suffers from multiple-page syndrome, it loads all the pages in the background, constructs a single, merged one, without the useless things of the original, presenting you the result.
Somewhere you forgot that news stands buy inventory. I don't see why google shouldn't do the same.
I have no idea whether this is the case on other countries, but here in Brazil newsstands don't "buy" inventory in any permanent way, except in rare cases. Of course they do pay to get the newspapers and magazines in their hands to be resold, but in the end of the day (or month) the publishers accept back (and pay back) whatever wasn't sold. If nothing was sold, the newsstand owner receives back every single cent he spent.
Slashdot Mirror
You, as an individual, can exchange some amount of your currency for US dollars only because there is something your country produces that Americans want to buy. At some point in the market there are producers in your country who won't sell for anything except your local currency, since that's what they must use to pay their employees' wages, their corporative taxes etc. Thus, for Americans to get these goods, they need to purchase first the local currency. The currency exchange rate between the US dollar and your local currency arises precisely from this ratio between goods purchasable exclusively in one currency, not the other.
If there were a country with zero need for made in USA products, whose production in turn were of no interest for any American, and which also did no business with any other country doing business with the USA (including OPEC), then this country's currency would have no exchange rate with the US dollar, and you wouldn't be able to purchase US dollars with your currency, no matter how many of it you had. Such a rate would simply not exist.
You, as an individual, is limited in your exchange ability by the production of goods and paper money in both countries. A foreign exchange market is an effect of a much more basic set of conditions, not something that exists all by itself.
IANAL (nor a programmer), but this is what I've heard and read many times on these same questions:
;)
1. Can I do it with Linux today (GPL2) and tomorrow (GPL3)?
A.: Yes, and yes.
2. Can I statically link the code with Linux libraries? (My own experience shows that dynamic linking is too much to bear.)
A.: Depends on the library. Some allow it, some don't. As a rule of thumb, if the library is licensed as GPL (any version), don't do it. But to be absolutely sure, read the license anyway. Some authors make changes to these default licenses allowing or prohibiting specific things.
3. Can I obfuscate my code (e.g. encode it)?
A.: Yes, but I don't see the point. It's akin to lock mechanisms or game protection: anyone wishing to reverse engineer the binary will do so no matter how much obfuscation you put into either the source code or the compiled output itself. See for example FreeDOS, which reverse engineered Microsoft DOS, or the Wine and ReactOS projects, which are reverse engineering Windows itself! Adding these security measures has only one practical effect: to make your software slower. No actual benefits, at all.
This is also a reason for you to not worry that much with your source code being published or not. Either your software is so valuable that it'll get reverse engineered anyway, or it's almost useless outside a niche market and as a result no one will be interested in reimplementing it no matter how much you post and repost the whole source tree all over the Internet. Besides, copyright laws already provide you full protection. If you in your license don't allow neither redistribution nor derivative works, both redistribution and deriving is forbidden no matter how many people can read your source code. Microsoft itself shows lots of its code to 3rd parties, but no one among those can use if for anything. It remains the sole property of Microsoft.
4. Could I be forced to publish this code by some 3-d party?
A.: If you follow "2" carefully, no. Otherwise, if you make a dumb choice of linked library, yes.
5. Am I correct that programming in and selling BSD-based boxes won't raise any of the above problems?
A.: Doesn't make a difference, since you must follow "2" anyway. What if that specific library you're statically linking into your compiled software isn't actually under BSD, but under something else? The best thing is to always read the license.
In any and all cases (and I mean it! GPL, BSD, Windows or whatever, doesn't matter) consult a lawyer if you have any doubt. Legal counseling is expensive for a reason.
I've posted the text below to today's thread on vegetable oil, but I think it's relevant for this thread, so here goes a copy:
The actual reason your (I'm Brazilian) government doesn't do this [the message I was replying to suggested USA simply stopped using foreign fuels] isn't because of oil itself. It's because it has since the 1970s a deal with OPEC by which all OPEC countries would accept only US dollars as payment for their oil, no matter who was purchasing it.
Now think about it: Germany, Brazil, China etc. want to purchase oil. Their currency isn't US dollar, it's something else. So, they must first acquire US dollars, and then use these dollars to purchase the oil. How do they do obtain US dollars? Well, the US government doesn't give US dollars to other countries for free, to get some they must sell goods to USA. At good prices, mind you, otherwise Americans won't purchase their goods, but those sold by some other country.
All these countries get the US dollars they need to purchase oil. But not only this amount. Imagine what would happen if for some reason Americans slowed down the purchase of their goods? No US dollars, no oil. Pretty bad, eh? So, all countries build reserves with billions of US dollars, as a way to purchase oil when and if the need arises. Now, obviously, some of these US dollars do come back to USA, otherwise USA would have no exports at all. OPEC countries, for instance, import lots of things from USA. They have tons of US dollars available due to only accepting this as a means of payment. Even so, though, most of these US dollars remain outside USA. Everyone has it, and everyone needs it, so other countries also allow exchanging goods among themselves using US dollars.
Now, US dollars reserves in foreign countries, as well as foreign exchange of goods using US dollars, both cause one important effect, more important than the above mentioned cheap import goods: less US dollars inside USA. And less dollars inside USA equals low inflation. In other words, this system allows USA to export its inflation to other countries, so that Americans themselves don't feel it. Were all the US dollars abroad come back to USA, and USA would feel a recessive inflation so extreme that 1929 would pale in comparison.
So, as I said in the beginning, the problems isn't oil itself. It's the money supply. Were OPEC to begin accepting other currencies, all these US dollars floating outside USA would be far less needed, thus starting to flow back into USA. And, guess what? Some months before USA deciding to wage war on Iraq, Saddam Hussein had decided to accept other currencies. Recently Iran has also shown interest in doing so. And what we began to hear? That USA is thinking about waging war on Iran.
So, don't be fooled. No matter whether the government is Republican or Democrat, any President of the USA will do the exact same thing. Because not doing, by allowing OPEC to accept other currencies, will mean years or even decades of extreme suffering to the American people. And no one has any idea how to solve the problem by any means other than bullying OPEC countries into conformance.
On the other hand, China, Russia, the European Union, all of them hate this system, because it ties their development to whatever is happening inside USA. And all of them would love to have their currencies among those accepted by OPEC countries, for this would yield them the same benefits USA have: inflation export and direct, non-USA dollar backed, cheap goods imports from all those countries who would need to build reserves of their currencies.
Do you smell 3rd World War on the air? I do. In a few years, decades if we're lucky, at everyone's backyard.
[PS for this statistics thread: if you consider that the actual goal is to stop OPEC countries from accepting currencies other than the US dollar, then so far it's being successful. Maybe not 100% so, but nevertheless more than if there were no war. Add this consideration to the statistical analysis and I bet its result would be very different.]
The actual reason your (I'm Brazilian) government doesn't do this isn't because of oil itself. It's because it has since the 1970s a deal with OPEC by which all OPEC countries would accept only US dollars as payment for their oil, no matter who was purchasing it.
Now think about it: Germany, Brazil, China etc. want to purchase oil. Their currency isn't US dollar, it's something else. So, they must first acquire US dollars, and then use these dollars to purchase the oil. How do they do obtain US dollars? Well, the US government doesn't give US dollars to other countries for free, to get some they must sell goods to USA. At good prices, mind you, otherwise Americans won't purchase their goods, but those sold by some other country.
All these countries get the US dollars they need to purchase oil. But not only this amount. Imagine what would happen if for some reason Americans slowed down the purchase of their goods? No US dollars, no oil. Pretty bad, eh? So, all countries build reserves with billions of US dollars, as a way to purchase oil when and if the need arises. Now, obviously, some of these US dollars do come back to USA, otherwise USA would have no exports at all. OPEC countries, for instance, import lots of things from USA. They have tons of US dollars available due to only accepting this as a means of payment. Even so, though, most of these US dollars remain outside USA. Everyone has it, and everyone needs it, so other countries also allow exchanging goods among themselves using US dollars.
Now, US dollars reserves in foreign countries, as well as foreign exchange of goods using US dollars, both cause one important effect, more important than the above mentioned cheap import goods: less US dollars inside USA. And less dollars inside USA equals low inflation. In other words, this system allows USA to export its inflation to other countries, so that Americans themselves don't feel it. Were all the US dollars abroad come back to USA, and USA would feel a recessive inflation so extreme that 1929 would pale in comparison.
So, as I said in the beginning, the problems isn't oil itself. It's the money supply. Were OPEC to begin accepting other currencies, all these US dollars floating outside USA would be far less needed, thus starting to flow back into USA. And, guess what? Some months before USA deciding to wage war on Iraq, Saddam Hussein had decided to accept other currencies. Recently Iran has also shown interest in doing so. And what we began to hear? That USA is thinking about waging war on Iran.
So, don't be fooled. No matter whether the government is Republican or Democrat, any President of the USA will do the exact same thing. Because not doing, by allowing OPEC to accept other currencies, will mean years or even decades of extreme suffering to the American people. And no one has any idea how to solve the problem by any means other than bullying OPEC countries into conformance.
On the other hand, China, Russia, the European Union, all of them hate this system, because it ties their development to whatever is happening inside USA. And all of them would love to have their currencies among those accepted by OPEC countries, for this would yield them the same benefits USA have: inflation export and direct, non-USA dollar backed, cheap goods imports from all those countries who would need to build reserves of their currencies.
Do you smell 3rd World War on the air? I do. In a few years, decades if we're lucky, at everyone's backyard.
Then the more sensible thing to do is to change the system so that you only pay for the amount of road you use, not the amount of fuel. Some cars use few fuel, others use lots, but if in doing so both "consume" the exact same 'n' miles of road, why should they pay different amounts for the privilege? A broad (while simple to use) toll system by which you were "taxed" some cents for every mile of paved road you actually traveled would be the ideal solution. Anything else seems distorted.
Strict gun control laws only work on small countries. The bigger the country is, the easier it is to smuggle illegal weapons into its territory, and the more difficult it is for authority to control what its population is doing. So, above a certain size (dunno what it is, but whatever it is, Canada surely surpasses it by some orders of magnitude), the easiest way to deal with violence is by enabling everyone to practice it, so that everyone controls everyone. Either this, or absolute control with zero privacy. What is better?
This isn't true at all. I run Firefox both in Windows XP and in Ubuntu, and while in Windows everything looks almost perfectly windowish, in Ubuntu some things follow your selected Gnome theme; some can be made to seem they follow it, for example by installing a special Ubuntu theme; and some, such as form buttons, look completely wrong, not following the Gnome standard at all and looking more like a poor man version of Windows 2000 buttons.
Proper Gnome integration is something that Firefox still lacks. The same can be said of other widely used Linux applications, such as OpenOffice, who completely ignores your Gnome font rendering settings. There's still a long way to go in this department. Firefox is just one among the many improperly behaving softwares.
You can of course argue that, given that an embryo/fetus is growing inside the body of a concrete woman, although killing him being has 50% chance of being an assassination, it is nevertheless worth it. But this does not change the fact that it's a 50% chance. The two lines of argumentation have no direct relation, or contradiction. The fact stays the same no matter what one chooses to do upon it, inside or outside any given legal framework.I think you're misreading what I wrote. My position is purely logical. You can call it "pro-consistency" if you wish. What I'm saying is imply this: that if in all our laws we require a higher level of certainty before taking extreme measures, then either this same principle must hold true for abortion, or we should change the remaining laws so that they work under the same level of reliability that we selected to apply to abortion. Personally I prefer the former. If you wish to give a name to this preference you can call it "pro-strictness", its opposite being then the "pro-strictlessness", or something like that. In any case, neither of these two positions contradict the logical conclusion I've stated. What I'm strongly against is the lack of consistency, the introduction of "exceptions" to the basic framework. And as they stand right now, pro-abortion laws (or judicial decisions) are extremely inconsistent.
In short: make all laws one way, or all laws the other way, not this mix of some laws being one way while others are the other way. And whatever option you choose, accept and adopt all of its logical consequences. Anything else and you're under cognitive dissonance.
"Pro-life" or "pro-choice"? That's secondary.
What we have nowadays isn't "free market" by any stretch of imagination. It's a market, sure, but very, very far from free.
No, no! You're not taking this from the correct angle. I'm not talking about they merely drug dealing, but about everything else they did while drug dealing for the sake of continuing to drug deal. For example: extortions, assassinations, thefts, putting dangerous venoms inside drugs to better profit etc. Any legalizing effort that doesn't make extremely clear that for these things they did while drug dealing they will still be persecuted and punished, with harsher punishments due to they having committed them in association with drug dealing, fails, because in the end such a legalization would reward them for the most outrageous of their wrongdoings.
One thing is the guy who simply distilled some spirit. Another is the Al Capone kind who also goes around machine-gunning rivals. You cannot threat both equally when you re-legalize things.
Don't you notice that when you choose consciousness as the delimiting point you're just adding another to the many possible points, and that opting for it is as much arbitrary as opting for any other?
As it stands, your argument, or rather, the meta-structure of your argument, in fact confirms mine, for my argument is precisely about this kind of argumentation, and as such it stands without me needing to actually enter each one of the multitude of discussions on which point is better, worse and why. It works, so to speak, one "abstraction layer" above yours.
You don't see a reason because it's not your own human status that is being discussed and on the verge of being negated. The logical consequence of your line of reasoning is that, if/when the political line changes and for some arbitrary reason you're no longer thought of as human, thus losing all the human protections that (actual) humans enjoy, this is perfectly okay and you should just accept it, until some day in future when you're thought of as human again. Provided, obviously, you weren't killed by (actual) humans in the meantime, something that by definition wouldn't have been assassination, but at best cruelty to an animal. :D
Hmm... No, I don't think this is correct. There are plenty of "otherization" means under an unified government. USA is the paradigmatic example: it has lots of divisions as things are, even being a single country. Race divisions ("they, the blacks", "they, the whites", "they, the Mexicans", "they, the native Americans"), geographic divisions ("they, the rednecks", "they, the southerners", "they, the northerners"), religious divisions ("they, the atheists", "they, the religious right", "they, the pagans
See why this kind of "non-reasoning" doesn't work?
Anyway, I didn't know Manning. Thanks for the link!
I don't hate them due to the drug dealing per se, but due to the crime and violence they used for and while drug dealing. Most of the legalization talk I hear fails to take into account that the former criminal drug dealers must still pay for the violence they did, even if from the moment drugs get legalized they start behaving as honest businessmen. Their previous fortunes were built upon blood, and letting they keep this money is blatant promotion of injustice to both the (new) honest and law abiding drug dealers as well as to the former victims of the criminal ones.
This comparison is unfair for the sole reason that wars (true ones, not cabinet wars) reshape the interpretation of the law as well as, many times, law itself. What happens inside a stable and stably-changing legal framework cannot be easily correlated to what happens outside of any framework and is, most of the time, framework-establishing.
You're correct in that it alone doesn't work, but it's nevertheless an important and necessary component of any effective deterrent. Drug users will try to drug themselves where there's less chance of doing something stupid. You'd end up with something akin to "drug pubs", not the middle of the street, and that's an improvement any way you look at it.
I do know both, yes. All "embryologic starting points" for a human life are indeed arbitrary, just follow the discussion. For some, it's the moment a nervous system becomes discernible. For others, it's the moment a brain appears. For others, it's the moment there's a pulsating hearth, or merely a hearth. For others yet, it's the moment cells have started differentiating, or the moment the differentiation reaches this or that percentage, or such number of cells, or such number of cell divisions. Entering developed fetuses properly, there are those that regard it as the moment it shows voluntary movements, or the moment it has the ability to live by itself outside of the mothers. And so on, and so forth. So much, indeed, that in the end you can have someone arguing with property for it to be set at any specific second in the 23 million or so seconds that the development takes. Choosing any of these is then arbitrary simply because the other 22,999,999 are as much convincing as the one you choose. And no matter which one it is, you are objectively either right, or wrong. Because there's no 1/3, 1/2 or 9/10 human life. There's either an human life, or no human life at all.
I talk about human right because I'm talking about a legal framework. Remove the legal framework, and we have what I exposed above: human life or no human life. Thus, either killing a human being (short form: assassinating) or not killing a human being. The fact that the law might concede to some persons the right to assassinate others when there's a 'n%' chance they've made this or that (or be this or that, etc.) is immaterial for this argument.
It comes into play when we're trying to determine what the law ought to be, onc
I consider myself a social conservative, but the "conservative" I refer myself to is of the very, very old kind. Meaning, pre-Victorian, pre-puritan, pre-modern, way down into the "Middle Age" kind of conservatism. And according to this conservatism, these are the answers to your points:
a) Marijuana should be legalized.
Yes, and other drugs too, provided three things are also done:
First: Everyone guilt of being in the drug business before legalization should still be prosecuted and incarcerated for doing so according to the previous laws, otherwise all alive drug cartel mafiosi assassins as well as all alive drug-funded guerrilla genocides would, in a matter of days, become legal and respected businessman, instead of psychopaths and sociopaths that should pay for their crimes. A complete new beginning is okay. A pardon for these guys isn't.
Second: Committing crimes while under the influence of a drug should multiply the incarcerated time, as already happens with drinking-influenced crimes.
Third: Tobacco usage should have the same freedom granted to drug usage. There's no reason in being pro-drug and anti-tobacco. Meaning: if it's not admissible for your to sue John Doe for providing you some marijuana he cultivated in his garden, it's not admissible for you to sue a multinational cigarette manufacturer for selling you tobacco.
Anything less and it simply wouldn't be a just move.
b) Abortion should be an option.
No, because there's no certainty whatsoever on when an embryo/fetus becomes a human being with human rights, only arbitrarily chosen points. For any given point in time, there are two possibilities: it's either the correct point, and the thing before that instant isn't a human being, thus having no human rights, thus his demise not being an assassination; or it's the wrong point, and you're indeed assassinating an human being. Since we don't know what's in any point we choose (3 months, 10 days, whatever, it doesn't matter), aborting is an act that always has 50% chance, minimum, of being an assassination. It's simply illogical to freely allow for something with such a high level of uncertainty. Mere common sense, devoid of any religious implication, dictates that in such a case the safe option be chosen, and the only available other option is not killing the embryo/fetus, because only by following it you're 100% sure you didn't commit an assassination.
If you disagree, then you should also follow the logical consequences of your disagreement and, for example, say that a 50% chance of one being guilty of having committed a crime given the collected evidence must be enough for him to be convicted, even when the conviction is the death penalty. If you think the correct in this case is, let's say, at least 99% certainty, the same must apply to abortion. Any divergence in approaches here would be, necessarily, a case of cognitive dissonance.
c) Physical torture doesn't work.
Usually correct. The only exception would be when you're almost 100% sure (see 'b') the victim know something he isn't willing to reveal. And even so, to torture someone would be an ethically valid act only if said knowledge were something that would allow you to immediately avoid worse things than the torture itself to happen, such as, for example, saving lives. Anything less, even possibly saving lives in a few months or years, isn't defensible in any way, shape or form.
d) There's nothing wrong with gay marriage.
The problem is not well exposed. The problem isn't in gay marriage. The problem is in marriage being a civil bound. This is a very recent development in the history of Western law. Up to some point in th
There were two also official kind of sequels with the NCC-1701-D crew.
The interesting thing is that, although I'm in principle against DRM, the DRM scheme used in these books is so user-friendly that I don't mind purchasing ebooks there at all. You can install the software in as many computers and handhelds you wish and put all your purchased ebooks simultaneously on all of them without any limitation (the same applies to the "Pro" version of the software), and you can copy from the ebook and paste into another application one paragraph at a time, what's more than enough for fair use, since you can do so for as many paragraphs as you wish). The only thing the software lacks is printing, but if you're in ebook reading to begin with that's hardly a problem, and if it at some moment becomes indeed a problem, you can copy/paste your way into paper. For all of this, the unlock code is merely the credit card number you used to purchase the ebook.
I wonder: wouldn't such a DRM scheme work well for music too? Purchase a music, be able to do whatever you want with it, in any device or computer you want, with the only requirement that you fill your credit card number for the music that didn't get automatically unlocked when the software attempted the credit card hashes (of course it should be hashes) already stored on its database. It'd be easy enough for almost no one to care.
Thus, when preaching to non-Christians and faced with worldviews extremely different from that of a standard Christian, the preacher has usually lots of freedom for "enveloping" the essential teachings into their concepts and language. Saint Paul is the example here, for he had no problem (given due limits, of course) in pointing to a Greek statue and saying "There, that's the god I'm talking about", then proceeding to explain what he means using Greek philosophical concepts (see Acts 17). The transition from Sheol into Hades, the later incorporation of Elysium as Limbo in a "why not?" way, as well as its refusal, are all in line with the ultimate objective of developing, in those who hear, trust in God.
You said it's up to God to decide who goes where. I cannot agree more. But for the same reason, it's up to God to decide on the details. And that's precisely why I also "prefer" (so to speak) the Orthodox church to the Western ones. The Western churches, Catholic and Protestants alike, try excessively to define things, and thus end up fighting over insignificant details. The Orthodox one stopped at the 7th Council and agreed that anything beyond that point is in a permanent "maybe" state. That's as good as it can get, except maybe if you also take into consideration the Coptic church, which stopped at the 4th one.
By the way, the more "down to Earth" reason for you not being able to reach Heaven by merely being a good person is that the Christian Hell is the Greek Hades, literally. According to Greek mythology, dead souls, good and evil alike, went to Hades. Obviously there were different "sections" there for the good and the evil, the place for the good ones being called, if I remember correctly, "Elysium Fields". But good or bad, it still was Hades -- nothing more, nothing less.
Thus, when Christianity began spreading, it hadn't to teach people about the existence of Hades. They simply said something like this:And so on and so forth.
Belief in the existence of God (or gods), as well as in the positive outcome of being good, were pretty much givens. For Christianity to be distinct it had to preach something very different. That people nowadays don't understand what this distinctiveness was (and still is) pretty much amazes me.
PS.: The old Elysium Fields still survives in Orthodox and Catholic Christian cosmogony. It's new name is "Limbo". If you think about Purgatory as the first level of Heaven, Limbo would be the first level of Hell. For those Christians that believe in it (or in both), it would be a seemingly nice place for the very good pagans. But it's nevertheless neither Heaven (properly) nor Purgatory, ranking far, far below both.
William Lind, a scholar on the subject of this new style of war, which he calls "4th Generation of Modern Warfare" (to distinguish it from the other 3 common types of military organization: organized battlefield; top-down order-based hierarchic army; and blitzkrieg) as a shortcut for something that is fast-paced, non-centralized, stateless, guerrilla-based, multi-polar and simultaneously global, international and local, says that the best way for one to defend himself from it is by doing two things:
a) Focus inwardly, trying to be on the smallest possible number of 4GW organization target lists. The less people hate you, the better you are;
b) Focus locally, building your defensive strategy on fast deployed forces stationed where they act and, if possible, made up of residents of the area, as well as lowering the dependency each area has on resources deployed from too much away. The more centralized and distant and your military force is, the weaker you are. The more dependent you are on goods and services coming from other cities, states and countries, the weaker you are. (Note that this isn't the same as neglecting a strong and big army. It's more of the way said army is built.)
USA fails on both aspects. It fails "a" miserably by making its presence felt all over the world, thus entering the list of almost everyone. And it fails "b" by encouraging a false sense of security on its population, when it should be making local militias and weapon usage proficiency as much widespread as possible, as well as by having an absolute, complete, all-embracing dependency on foreign natural resources, goods, services and work.
On a 4GW world, this is a recipe for disaster.
For the whole world up to the 19th century (or 18th, I'm not sure now), and for part of it still today, there were two, and only two, ages for a person: childhood and adulthood. No middle ground. The precise age varied, but usually a male human was a "boy" until his 13th anniversary, and a "man" afterwards (12th anniversary for females). Did it work? Yes, it did. Marvelously. Faced with adult problems, the "children" of the time matured at an incredibly fast pace.
There were no reasons for things to change, except one: if you accept the invented concept of a middle ground, the so called "adolescence", you are suddenly faced with the "problem" of young adults wanting to act as, well, adults. And how do you "solve" it? Hell, by asking for government regulation, of course! Politicians, who are mad but not dumb, jumped in the bandwagon and devised all sorts of regulation to be applied to "adolescents". After all, why not? More laws always means more power.
The only solution for this kind of BS would be for a complete dismissal of the whole concept. But neither people nor politicians are able to think that much out-of-the-box. For the decades and maybe centuries following us, "adolescence" will still be seen as obviously existing, as will laws regulating it be seen as obviously needed. For a long, long time, those disagreeing with this will be only a minority.
On a side note: the same can be said regarding marriage. For most of human century it wasn't a legal matter. No government had anything to say on it. But this also changed in the 19th century, when some people began demanding for relationships to be regulated. And now we must deal with all the problems resulting from this desire. If the whole idea of civil marriage were dismissed, where would the discussion on the prohibition of polygamy (think Mormons in Utah and Muslims immigrants) be? Where would the recent same-sex marriage discussions be? Nowhere. "Marriage" would remain a purely religious concept, completely ignored by secular governments, who would simply see people living together and sharing property without any interest whatsoever on what they were doing between themselves and in relation to said property. No legal discussion would exist for lack of substance.
But go talk to anyone involved in these disputes that they (all sides: heterosexual monogamous, homosexual monogamous, polygamous etc.!) shouldn't be asking for more government interference in matters of interpersonal relationships, but for less of it, for the elimination of all or almost all laws defining and regulating marriage, and see what happens. Almost no one gets it. Marriage as a legal matter is here to stay, as much as "adolescence".
Those who know better? Their only option is to endure the whole madness. Sad, but true...
I think it's about time for someone to develop a "MergeNews" Firefox addon. You load an article in a known news source that suffers from multiple-page syndrome, it loads all the pages in the background, constructs a single, merged one, without the useless things of the original, presenting you the result.
;)
Who's up to the task?