I can drive from, say, Oklahoma City to Dallas, on my own, without being waylaid by bandits along the way. If we could travel only in convoys with armed guards, then the world would be as dangerous as it has been. As it is now, that's only state leaders who need that. Does the mayor have to worry about being assassinated so his sister's son can take the "throne"? No. Safer! You only have to look at the average ages people are living to for proof that the world is much safer now then it was. People keep saying the world is more dangerous; more dangerous compared to what?
Moot point. I can turn a car into a death machine pretty easily as well. Or a horse cart full of explosives, if you want to take it back to Ben Franklin's days. In fact, that was the method of delivery for the first "car bomb", I think the IRA used it in the early 1900s. It would be easier to stop another box-cutter hijacking then it is to stop a car bomb.
Non-kosher foods weren't officially accepted for Christians until after Peter had the vision on a rooftop (it's in Acts 10:9-17) of all the animals, "clean" and "unclean", and was told that they're all okay to eat. Peter saw all kinds of animals, even reptiles, and heard the voice of God saying "Go, kill and eat". Peter then says that he's never eaten anything impure, indicating that before this point the early (very early) Christians still followed Kosher dietary restrictions. This was also seen as a sign from God that Gentiles as well as Jews should be converted.
I wouldn't really call it a Qu'ranic inconsistency, it may be that Muhammed either didn't know or care about the difference, or that the Christians in that part of the world in that time frame still ate kosher for health reasons. Kosher food reduces the chance of trichinosis and other illnesses, especially in a primitive environment.
Don't ask how a shamanistic pagan knows so much about Judeo-Christian theology;)
Didn't we just cover this earlier today? School is not allowed to go into home!
Dammit, I wasn't really happy with being homeschooled, but even so I might wind up doing that for my kids if they keep this shit up. If I'm being that shitty of a parent that my kid is doing all kinds of stuff I don't know about, that's on me and my kid, not on Principal Skinner.
I agree wholeheartedly with First Sale, and prefer to buy used whenever I can, but if you're going to have EULAs, they make more sense for OSs then for games.
While I am by no means a fan of Microsoft, or WinXP, or it's EULA, there is a big difference between an OS that you will be using until it's time to upgrade (usually years) and a game you're gonna play for a while and then forget about. Most games out there you'll get about 100 hours use from, TOPS. I get more use than that from XP in a couple weeks.
Of digging itself into the ground. And then drilling deeper, all the way until they smell feet.
I do more gaming on my PC anyway, and I can make a PC now to do what a PS3 will do later, for about the same price and without the lunacy. Does Nintendo and Microsoft have agents working in the higher levels of Sony to kill the company? I feel like I'm watching Paramount's strenuous efforts to bury Star Trek all over again.
...the emotional bonds of love and hate formed between generator mechanics and their boxy buddies.
"Dammit A54! Why did you have to shut down again? Wait... there's coolant... everywhere... NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" "I'm sorry son, but A54 is... beyond economical repair. We'll have to send it back to depot for major repairs." "Why! Oh god why!"
And of course the less dramatic but far more common: WARNING: LOTS OF OBSCENITY "Fuck! You son of a bitch piece of shit! You monkeyfucking mothersucking dicklicking gorram crappy whorebitchfuckfuckfuck! Why won't you fucking work? Where the fucking fuck is the shit-eating fault? Oh sure, you bitch, you'll start up and make it seem like everything is all fucking wonderful, but as soon as you get up to operational RPM your goatfucking dickcheese devil-kissed overpressure relay kicks on and you shut down! Why!"
Agreed on the free speech stuff. Whether I like it or not, people are welcome to put their crazy thoughts out there. In fact, I welcome it, I love having people demonstrate the furthest reaches of insanity, it makes it so much easier to argue with, and the Fred Phelps of the world have a tendency to make people close to that but not all the way there reconsider their own positions. Rather like how a decent person would feel if they agreed with the Klan on something.
I don't know where the New Testament promotes slavery, although it definately takes a male-centric approach.
Provided solely for the purpose of informing and educating (all references are NIV: Ephesians 6:5 - Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Colossians 3:22 - Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. 1 Timothy 6:1-2 - All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God's name and our teaching may not be slandered. Those who have believing masters are not to show less respect for them because they are brothers. Instead, they are to serve them even better, because those who benefit from their service are believers, and dear to them. These are the things you are to teach and urge on them. Titus 2:9 - Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, 1 Peter 2:18 - Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.
It's worth noting that nowhere in the New Testament does it say anything about masters freeing the slaves, slavery being inherently evil, the fact that the subjugation of another human being is a monstrous and immoral thing, nothing like that. I couldn't find anything, in the NT, about slavery being wrong. That's probably why the slave states in the U.S. never saw anything wrong with it. If you ignore both reason and empathy, and simply go off what a holy book says, there's a lot of things in many religions that are acceptable. It could be said that those sections in the NT were simply written to be in context of that time period, that slavery was a normal part of society back then. The same could be said of the parts of the Koran that people find objectionable. The fact is that, while the New Testament says many earthshaking and revolutionary things, they never take a stand against something like slavery which we realize is obviously reprehensible. Jesus never said anything about it, or if he did, it was edited out after his death. Now, something I've found curious is that the early church fathers denounced slavery and converts often freed their slaves, however, after Christianity was adopted as state religion by the Roman Empire the tune changed. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that the Empire ran in large part due to slavery. The curious part of this is that the Council of Nicene, which selected which books of the bible were canon and which weren't, was established by a Roman Emperor. I do not find it a vast leap to think that bible books and passages condemning slavery may have been tossed out as not being dogmatically pure. They may even have edited Jesus' words to remove references to slavery, either for or against.
I'm against Walmart because I have a friend in a lower-income family who worked there, they treated her like shit, she had to put up with constant sexual harassment, intimidation, and they made her work through her pregnant leave. She could have left and worked somewhere else, except that all the places she had worked had been driven out of business by Walmart. I have no idea how you think someone living in a city makes them anti-environment, if they lived in the country you would deride them for being teepee-living hippies. In major cities the public transportation systems tend to be more develop, allowed a conscientious liberal to utilize a bus or rail system, instead of driving, helping the environment. And for a leftist government that has helped the country, FDR. I'd be curious how you think the rightists have succeeded in the country, or in contributing to it at all.
I'm a left winger and a liberal, and I'm in the military.
What would you expect us to do, just go jump out and start busting heads? That got us stuck in iraq, and it is the mental process behind decades of bad American foreign policy. You do need to act sometimes. You also need to think before you act. If we can combine those, we're doing great.
How can you tell if is a terrorist or not before it has been settled by a court of law? You magically know the truth?
Oh my god! We must jail everybody so we can put them on trial for terrorism! But wait! If everyone is a suspect, then we all must be jailed, and who will try us?
Of course, we don't just jail , we require some measure of evidence or reason for suspicion before can be sent to court. The same is true of surveillance. We can't put a great big fishing net out there and see what we catch, it's a waste of time and resources, and an invasion of privacy. We go for the people who give us a reason to suspect them, then we take that reason to the nice old judge in charge of handing out FISA secret court warrants, and then we can spy on them all we like. Easy!
"A new poll shows that 66% of Americans think President Bush is doing a poor job of handling the war in Iraq. The remaining 34% think that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church." ~Tina Fey, "Weekend Review"
If you knew that Bush was going to launch a pre-emptive and unjustified nuclear attack against, say, Japan, you should leak that information. Then you'd be a hero.
...the terrorists win. To the terrorist facillitators who have allowed this, enjoy your safety. Everyone who has cheerleaded the administration, congrats, you're helping the terrorists.
I do not live in fear of hell, or allow that fear to dictate how I live my life now. My religious beliefs, a mix of shamanism and paganism, do not condemn my lifestyle. I did not take on my religion for these reasons, but because it's what fits me best.
I do not fear non-existence. Should I cease to exist, then that is the way of things. Living in constant fear of dying, well, ironically, that is a thought that frightens me. I picture a caveman cringing under an outcropping of rock, terrified at the lightning and thunder, terrified of going out and hunting because of the wild animals out there, instead of facing his fear and advancing himself and his race.
I certainly don't fear a hackneyed concept of hellfire born out of the fear and ignorance of the Dark Ages, when religion and fear of hell and the afterlife was used by the Church to control the ignorant masses.
I couldn't be a Muslim for the same reason I couldn't be a Christian, I do not want to accept restrictions on my life for religious reasons. I don't want to pray five times a day; although if you are a Muslim, you do have a very good reason for it, it focuses the mind on service to Allah. In much the same way, I do not wish to be obligated to donate 10% of my income to the church; although this too has a good reason if you're a Christian, it effectively mandates charitable giving and even has a Bible story to back it up.
It is worth noting that, while I am not an atheist or devoid of deities to worship (I follow the lessons of Coyote, Fox, and Crow), I bear no emnity towards atheists. My opinion is that if you need an ancient book to tell you what is right and what is wrong, your moral compass is so fucked up that you aren't likely to listen. If you do not need an ancient book to tell you right from wrong, then you do not need religion to have a moral compass. Simple!
Slashdot Mirror
I can drive from, say, Oklahoma City to Dallas, on my own, without being waylaid by bandits along the way. If we could travel only in convoys with armed guards, then the world would be as dangerous as it has been. As it is now, that's only state leaders who need that. Does the mayor have to worry about being assassinated so his sister's son can take the "throne"? No. Safer! You only have to look at the average ages people are living to for proof that the world is much safer now then it was. People keep saying the world is more dangerous; more dangerous compared to what?
Moot point. I can turn a car into a death machine pretty easily as well. Or a horse cart full of explosives, if you want to take it back to Ben Franklin's days. In fact, that was the method of delivery for the first "car bomb", I think the IRA used it in the early 1900s. It would be easier to stop another box-cutter hijacking then it is to stop a car bomb.
Non-kosher foods weren't officially accepted for Christians until after Peter had the vision on a rooftop (it's in Acts 10:9-17) of all the animals, "clean" and "unclean", and was told that they're all okay to eat. Peter saw all kinds of animals, even reptiles, and heard the voice of God saying "Go, kill and eat". Peter then says that he's never eaten anything impure, indicating that before this point the early (very early) Christians still followed Kosher dietary restrictions. This was also seen as a sign from God that Gentiles as well as Jews should be converted.
;)
I wouldn't really call it a Qu'ranic inconsistency, it may be that Muhammed either didn't know or care about the difference, or that the Christians in that part of the world in that time frame still ate kosher for health reasons. Kosher food reduces the chance of trichinosis and other illnesses, especially in a primitive environment.
Don't ask how a shamanistic pagan knows so much about Judeo-Christian theology
Didn't we just cover this earlier today? School is not allowed to go into home!
Dammit, I wasn't really happy with being homeschooled, but even so I might wind up doing that for my kids if they keep this shit up. If I'm being that shitty of a parent that my kid is doing all kinds of stuff I don't know about, that's on me and my kid, not on Principal Skinner.
"Time to die, Meatbag"
"What did you say?"
"Nothing, the mortal blood rushing through your ears must have caused you to hear things that aren't there. Meatbag."
"What do you mea- *ERK!*"
They also did it with Ultraviolet, Gigli, Aeon Flux IIRC...
I agree wholeheartedly with First Sale, and prefer to buy used whenever I can, but if you're going to have EULAs, they make more sense for OSs then for games.
While I am by no means a fan of Microsoft, or WinXP, or it's EULA, there is a big difference between an OS that you will be using until it's time to upgrade (usually years) and a game you're gonna play for a while and then forget about. Most games out there you'll get about 100 hours use from, TOPS. I get more use than that from XP in a couple weeks.
Of digging itself into the ground. And then drilling deeper, all the way until they smell feet.
I do more gaming on my PC anyway, and I can make a PC now to do what a PS3 will do later, for about the same price and without the lunacy. Does Nintendo and Microsoft have agents working in the higher levels of Sony to kill the company? I feel like I'm watching Paramount's strenuous efforts to bury Star Trek all over again.
Especially the hot Cylon part. Yay sin!
Doesn't suffer much, but I've still had my M-16 jam or otherwise malfunction a few times.
...the emotional bonds of love and hate formed between generator mechanics and their boxy buddies.
"Dammit A54! Why did you have to shut down again? Wait... there's coolant... everywhere... NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
"I'm sorry son, but A54 is... beyond economical repair. We'll have to send it back to depot for major repairs."
"Why! Oh god why!"
And of course the less dramatic but far more common:
WARNING: LOTS OF OBSCENITY
"Fuck! You son of a bitch piece of shit! You monkeyfucking mothersucking dicklicking gorram crappy whorebitchfuckfuckfuck! Why won't you fucking work? Where the fucking fuck is the shit-eating fault? Oh sure, you bitch, you'll start up and make it seem like everything is all fucking wonderful, but as soon as you get up to operational RPM your goatfucking dickcheese devil-kissed overpressure relay kicks on and you shut down! Why!"
Agreed on the free speech stuff. Whether I like it or not, people are welcome to put their crazy thoughts out there. In fact, I welcome it, I love having people demonstrate the furthest reaches of insanity, it makes it so much easier to argue with, and the Fred Phelps of the world have a tendency to make people close to that but not all the way there reconsider their own positions. Rather like how a decent person would feel if they agreed with the Klan on something.
I don't know where the New Testament promotes slavery, although it definately takes a male-centric approach.
Provided solely for the purpose of informing and educating (all references are NIV:
Ephesians 6:5 - Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.
Colossians 3:22 - Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.
1 Timothy 6:1-2 - All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God's name and our teaching may not be slandered. Those who have believing masters are not to show less respect for them because they are brothers. Instead, they are to serve them even better, because those who benefit from their service are believers, and dear to them. These are the things you are to teach and urge on them.
Titus 2:9 - Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them,
1 Peter 2:18 - Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.
It's worth noting that nowhere in the New Testament does it say anything about masters freeing the slaves, slavery being inherently evil, the fact that the subjugation of another human being is a monstrous and immoral thing, nothing like that. I couldn't find anything, in the NT, about slavery being wrong. That's probably why the slave states in the U.S. never saw anything wrong with it. If you ignore both reason and empathy, and simply go off what a holy book says, there's a lot of things in many religions that are acceptable. It could be said that those sections in the NT were simply written to be in context of that time period, that slavery was a normal part of society back then. The same could be said of the parts of the Koran that people find objectionable. The fact is that, while the New Testament says many earthshaking and revolutionary things, they never take a stand against something like slavery which we realize is obviously reprehensible. Jesus never said anything about it, or if he did, it was edited out after his death. Now, something I've found curious is that the early church fathers denounced slavery and converts often freed their slaves, however, after Christianity was adopted as state religion by the Roman Empire the tune changed. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that the Empire ran in large part due to slavery. The curious part of this is that the Council of Nicene, which selected which books of the bible were canon and which weren't, was established by a Roman Emperor. I do not find it a vast leap to think that bible books and passages condemning slavery may have been tossed out as not being dogmatically pure. They may even have edited Jesus' words to remove references to slavery, either for or against.
Christianity promotes slavery and keeping women second-class citizens. If I have to I can dig up the New Testament verses referencing that.
I'm against Walmart because I have a friend in a lower-income family who worked there, they treated her like shit, she had to put up with constant sexual harassment, intimidation, and they made her work through her pregnant leave. She could have left and worked somewhere else, except that all the places she had worked had been driven out of business by Walmart. I have no idea how you think someone living in a city makes them anti-environment, if they lived in the country you would deride them for being teepee-living hippies. In major cities the public transportation systems tend to be more develop, allowed a conscientious liberal to utilize a bus or rail system, instead of driving, helping the environment. And for a leftist government that has helped the country, FDR. I'd be curious how you think the rightists have succeeded in the country, or in contributing to it at all.
Ouch.
But true.
I'm a left winger and a liberal, and I'm in the military.
What would you expect us to do, just go jump out and start busting heads? That got us stuck in iraq, and it is the mental process behind decades of bad American foreign policy. You do need to act sometimes. You also need to think before you act. If we can combine those, we're doing great.
Majority of Liberals = smart and educated
Majority of Slashdot users = smart and educated
The crossover there means that yeah, of course a lot of slashdot readers will be liberals.
Ohhhhh, that was flamebait and I don't even care it felt goooood!
How can you tell if is a terrorist or not before it has been settled by a court of law? You magically know the truth?
Oh my god! We must jail everybody so we can put them on trial for terrorism! But wait! If everyone is a suspect, then we all must be jailed, and who will try us?
Of course, we don't just jail , we require some measure of evidence or reason for suspicion before can be sent to court. The same is true of surveillance. We can't put a great big fishing net out there and see what we catch, it's a waste of time and resources, and an invasion of privacy. We go for the people who give us a reason to suspect them, then we take that reason to the nice old judge in charge of handing out FISA secret court warrants, and then we can spy on them all we like. Easy!
They don't have a 2nd and think we're crazy for wanting one. Guess they need a V and a whole lot of Guy Fawkes masks.
"A new poll shows that 66% of Americans think President Bush is doing a poor job of handling the war in Iraq. The remaining 34% think that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church."
~Tina Fey, "Weekend Review"
It'll be like the Republicans during the last few years of the Clinton presidency.
Burn!
If you knew that Bush was going to launch a pre-emptive and unjustified nuclear attack against, say, Japan, you should leak that information. Then you'd be a hero.
...the terrorists win. To the terrorist facillitators who have allowed this, enjoy your safety. Everyone who has cheerleaded the administration, congrats, you're helping the terrorists.
I do not live in fear of hell, or allow that fear to dictate how I live my life now. My religious beliefs, a mix of shamanism and paganism, do not condemn my lifestyle. I did not take on my religion for these reasons, but because it's what fits me best.
I do not fear non-existence. Should I cease to exist, then that is the way of things. Living in constant fear of dying, well, ironically, that is a thought that frightens me. I picture a caveman cringing under an outcropping of rock, terrified at the lightning and thunder, terrified of going out and hunting because of the wild animals out there, instead of facing his fear and advancing himself and his race.
I certainly don't fear a hackneyed concept of hellfire born out of the fear and ignorance of the Dark Ages, when religion and fear of hell and the afterlife was used by the Church to control the ignorant masses.
I couldn't be a Muslim for the same reason I couldn't be a Christian, I do not want to accept restrictions on my life for religious reasons. I don't want to pray five times a day; although if you are a Muslim, you do have a very good reason for it, it focuses the mind on service to Allah. In much the same way, I do not wish to be obligated to donate 10% of my income to the church; although this too has a good reason if you're a Christian, it effectively mandates charitable giving and even has a Bible story to back it up.
It is worth noting that, while I am not an atheist or devoid of deities to worship (I follow the lessons of Coyote, Fox, and Crow), I bear no emnity towards atheists. My opinion is that if you need an ancient book to tell you what is right and what is wrong, your moral compass is so fucked up that you aren't likely to listen. If you do not need an ancient book to tell you right from wrong, then you do not need religion to have a moral compass. Simple!