Again, I wish I had mod points. I say that churches are no longer tax exempt. Nothing says that the church can't own a charitable organization that does real charity and can prove it and that entity be tax exempt. Of course, the law would have to be written to avoid abuse of that caveat and having all church employees work for and all revenue go to the tax exempt entity.
The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals.
I'm really getting tired of shooting down your false assertions, guys. Revoking tax exempt status for churches would only revoke tax exempt status for CHURCHES!!!!
The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals.
Leaving aside the problems this would likely pose under American law, in the United States it's generally the case that non-profit corporations are not taxed at any level of government.
How does paying taxes keep you or the church from freely exercising a religion? Please use as many big words as you like. I am college educated. Keep in mind that no one is talking about taxing churches differently than any other for-profit organization, and if you think a church is non-profit you've been hitting the sacramental wine a bit too heavily. And you better read this before you say something else that isn't true and parrot the other idiots in this thread.
The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals.
Bennett, please stop trying to do science. You're not good at it. If you don't know what you're doing, and clearly you demonstrated that with the laughable "survey", there are places to get information about conducting proper research studies. They are called "graduate education programs in survey research" for the DIY crowd (here's a good one), and then there are for-hire services that can do them for you. Either way, get some help before you embarrass yourself again.
People here like to poke fun at the long posts by Bennett Hassleton. This one is actually pretty good.
He saw something, constructed an experiement using readily available resources, got statistically significant results (just about) and made an intereesting post detailing the methodology.
To my mind this is interesting in comparison to more formal academic studies as it shows that you can get reasonable results as a lone wolf with a limited budget and no research institution.
I like this post. Go Bennett.
He posted an ad hoc, anecdotal, unscientific "survey" and generated 101 responses and then claims credibility, and you commend him?!?! You must have been dropped on your head, too, then, yes?
I agree with the OP, but not with what you said. The Internet has enabled and emboldened those that would be passive agressive under face-to-face circumstances to be much more animalistic and capable of carrying out their threats. Why? Because the consequences for saying such things is minimalized and in a lot of cases supported by other people thinking and saying the same things. The disconnect from any real consequences and the support whackos can find on the Internet, definitely makes it, not the whole human race, the sick place to be. Hell, I like to build things and get information from the Internet, but I wouldn't want to live there! It's a vile nasty place filled with juvenile behavior and sick twisted world views, for the most part. All you have to do is read some comments on news sites and the like some time if you really want to see how scary it is!
A new report concludes that the use of eyewitness accounts need tighter control, and among its recommendations is a call for a more scientific approach to how eyewitnesses identify suspects during the classic police lineup.
The whole lineup process is usually rigged, and can easily be rigged to single out an individual from a pack of "suspects". The lineup is the problem as that tool can too easily be manipulated to garner eyewitness testimony from someone that only "thinks" that's the person they saw and is then coached to say they are "positive" that's the person they saw. And yes, I like the example noted above of "My Cousin Vinny". It's somewhat comically presented, but the fact is people have been wrongfully convicted from dubious "eyewitness testimony" for centuries! Forensic evidence has been helping to curtail these type of wrongful convictions, but sometimes long after the fact.
It's easy for him to bash the current Regime, especially that crack about pushing harder to keep troops in Iraq. They wanted us GONE. Hell, WE wanted us GONE.
Yep, and they conveniently leave out that W signed the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq in 2008 that got us out, including the time table for doing so.
Awful damned easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. Where was HE when the shit was getting ready to pile up?
Apparently, he was writing a book... because at no time during either of his positions under the Obama administration did I ever hear him say one word about "we must leave troops in Iraq" or anything even close to that. Maybe someone can find a quote or video for me, but this sounds a lot like pandering to a base constituency to buy his book given how popular Obama bashing is these days.
If you've done something to earn that much hate, maybe you ought to take a step back and re-evaluate your position.
Who says he earned it? Trolls and just plain socipathic and psychopathic people don't need reasons to hate. Reason rarely factors into their behavior at all. They hate someone because they have a different viewpoint, or they called a shitty piece of code (possibly written by one of these psychopaths) a shitty piece of code. And from his post I would say that he is definitely re-evaluating his position, much to the loss of the Open Source community.
"And that's all about this topic from me. I have no intentions to ever talk about this again on a public forum." -- LP... throws bombs at Linus, generalizes, brings race and culture in as pejoratives... his post is as well written as systemd
Spoken like a true Anonymous Coward. I find it hypocritical of you to throw stones and call someone else a coward while posting as an AC on/.
Likely means they miscalculated all the past prediction models as well. It works BOTH ways. It's called an "equation".
It's also called science, which some people want to nay say as it self corrects its assumptions based on new data. The whole point of scientific theories and models is that they change over time as new information is added. Why people go off on this as if it were proof that science is "wrong" is mind boggling. Even if it is "wrong" as of today, it wasn't wrong based on the information we had before today! New data changes the model and we get a more accurate answer.
A "might" "suggest" gets us no where until that is refined into something more definite.
Correct, which means nay saying is also dubious based on the results of one study. Most rational people, however, tend to err on the side of caution and not the side of apathy. More studies will follow as graduate students build on the previous research and add to the findings. This is how research works. Once a concensus is reached then scietific facts change to incorporate this new data. At that time, anyone is welcome to their dissent of the facts. They are also welcome to a unicorn, a lifetime subscription to Fox News and a flying pig.
Really? Simple thermodynamics must escape you. Heat is energy. That energy once absorbed has to go somewhere. In the case of warming the surface or oceans the heat radiates back toward space (eventually), but a portion is reflected back toward Earth causing a sustainable rise in overall global temperatures due to thickness and composition of the atmosphere. Yes, as the oceans warm up currents change and the whole three dimensional system is thrown out of balance and tries to rebalance itself within the new parameters, much like the air above the oceans and land does. The problem is that new balance may not be suitable for life as we know it to continue and we have mass extinctions and food shortages as a potential outcome. This is all simple Earth Science stuff learned in grade school.
No, 99% safe vaccine is not ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better that disease. It is not even better than disease itself. Will you get yourself vaccinated against AIDS if it has 1% of chance giving you AIDS in first place?
Vaccines are safe to 99.9999% or more. And you always have to put it into context. If Ebola will spread to billions, 99% safe vaccine might be acceptable. If AIDS is perfectly preventable in normal case, even 1:million safety might be not enough. But please be careful with 99% and 'orders of magnitude' in same sentence - there are not that many orders of magnitude in 1:100.
Except we're talking about billions of people, not one hundred, so yes, orders of magnitude and percentages do apply in context. Nice try. And yes, if AIDS had become a pandemic like Ebola threatens to become I would definitely take a 1% chance of getting AIDS if it meant that I would not get AIDS at all should the vaccine work. The bottom line on that is if I didn't get the vaccine the odds of contracting the disease could be much higher than 1% of six billion (and change). Some of us do have the capacity to work with numbers larger than 100, and do floating point math on those numbers in our heads, i.e., we're over the age of 12 years.
Just because your model predicted the outcome of something does not mean your model is accurate.
Correct, but if the model predicts the outcome more than half the time, or up to ninety percent of the time, then it's pretty accurate. It may not be precise, but it is accurate.
One thing is clear from all the data, and you can get the same data online as it is free access and abundant, there is a direct correlation between the rise in fossil fuel use starting with the Industrial Revolution (~1850) and the incremental rise in global average temperatures. Yes, I know, correlation and causation don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, but in this case there is a very strong indicator of cause and effect, beyond a (sane) reasonable doubt. The graph of the two data sets show linear consistency over time with very few outliers. This is why anyone who has actually taken the time to research climate change on their own has come to the conclusion that humans are changing the climate through our burning of fossil fuels. If you disagree you either have money involved in the fight, are burying your head in the sand and hoping it all goes away, or are completely out of touch with reality and need immediate psychiatric care.
So it wasnt going into the oceans before and all of a sudden started going into the oceans all at once? Thus creating a "pause"? Why wasnt the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
There are some really simple explanations for this: one, the ocean currents changed (due to changes in the atmospheric climate) forcing more of the warmer water deeper into the ocean than before, two, no one said it was an "all-at-once" thing, and even if they did their perspective on "all-at-once" may be decades where you may be thinking more immediately, three, no one said that the rise in air temperatures WASN'T heating the oceans all along. As a matter of fact the continuing rise in ocean temperature has always been a priority concern to climatologists because of the impact on the entire food chain.
I really see these exploits and publishing their existence as a double edged sword problem. On one hand, as an asministrator of systems I'd like to know immediately that there is an exploit so I can shut down a service, if I can, so it doesn't get exploited before I can patch it. On the other hand if the knowledge of an exploit gets into the public then more people are going to try to exploit systems that may be vulnerable, so keeping it quiet may also be beneficial.
Where do you draw the line, and for what reasons? Heartbleed was a major exploit, but was easily patched in short order, however, how many systems had been exploited before the patch was released and by whom? The same goes for Shellshock, although that exploit wasn't patched before it went public and we still see exploits at work due to bash's abundance.
I lean toward the make-it-publicly-known-ASAP camp as I would want to be able to take proactive measures to mitigate any vulnerability before it was exploited or patched. In some cases (not necessarily the Heartbleed and Shellshock examples) patching may fix the vulnerability, but the system may still be compromised if it has been exploited and the damage is already done; and amy continue until you rebuild the system. If the vulnerability was kept quiet during patch development, not knowing gave the attacker time to get what ever they were after off a compromised system before the patch, and potentially not stop further data theft after the patch.
It's really hard to say which option--to tell or not to tell--is the best course. When a vulnerability is found by a security researcher doesn't necessarily correlate to no infected systems in the wild. Who knows who found it first, a good guy or a bad guy, and there may very well be systems exploited in the wild that a patch has little effect on other than fixing a hole that's already been plumbed out by a bad guy.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, I wish I had mod points. I say that churches are no longer tax exempt. Nothing says that the church can't own a charitable organization that does real charity and can prove it and that entity be tax exempt. Of course, the law would have to be written to avoid abuse of that caveat and having all church employees work for and all revenue go to the tax exempt entity.
From:
The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals.
I'm really getting tired of shooting down your false assertions, guys. Revoking tax exempt status for churches would only revoke tax exempt status for CHURCHES!!!!
That makes no sense. The 501(c)3 tax code doesn't mention churches or religion at all.
Umm, yes it does:
The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals.
If only I had mod points...
Leaving aside the problems this would likely pose under American law, in the United States it's generally the case that non-profit corporations are not taxed at any level of government.
How does paying taxes keep you or the church from freely exercising a religion? Please use as many big words as you like. I am college educated. Keep in mind that no one is talking about taxing churches differently than any other for-profit organization, and if you think a church is non-profit you've been hitting the sacramental wine a bit too heavily. And you better read this before you say something else that isn't true and parrot the other idiots in this thread.
From:
The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c)(3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals.
Bennett, please stop trying to do science. You're not good at it. If you don't know what you're doing, and clearly you demonstrated that with the laughable "survey", there are places to get information about conducting proper research studies. They are called "graduate education programs in survey research" for the DIY crowd (here's a good one), and then there are for-hire services that can do them for you. Either way, get some help before you embarrass yourself again.
We're happy to hear your stories. But, listen: maybe they should go on the fridge, instead of the front page of Slashdot. Ok, bud?
I didn't know Mom posted the "F" graded assigments on the fridge?
OK
People here like to poke fun at the long posts by Bennett Hassleton. This one is actually pretty good.
He saw something, constructed an experiement using readily available resources, got statistically significant results (just about) and made an intereesting post detailing the methodology.
To my mind this is interesting in comparison to more formal academic studies as it shows that you can get reasonable results as a lone wolf with a limited budget and no research institution.
I like this post. Go Bennett.
He posted an ad hoc, anecdotal, unscientific "survey" and generated 101 responses and then claims credibility, and you commend him?!?! You must have been dropped on your head, too, then, yes?
No, you don't understand how real research and statistics work, try reading these: https://explorable.com/statist... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... http://stats.stackexchange.com... http://www.sciencebuddies.org/... It's obvious Bennett has no academic credentials beyond a bachelor's degree or maybe even High School Diploma given his drivel above.
Fuck Bennett Haselton and the idiots that promote his idiotic posts! Yes, you timothy! and any other "editor" that posts his crap!
I agree with the OP, but not with what you said. The Internet has enabled and emboldened those that would be passive agressive under face-to-face circumstances to be much more animalistic and capable of carrying out their threats. Why? Because the consequences for saying such things is minimalized and in a lot of cases supported by other people thinking and saying the same things. The disconnect from any real consequences and the support whackos can find on the Internet, definitely makes it, not the whole human race, the sick place to be. Hell, I like to build things and get information from the Internet, but I wouldn't want to live there! It's a vile nasty place filled with juvenile behavior and sick twisted world views, for the most part. All you have to do is read some comments on news sites and the like some time if you really want to see how scary it is!
Or, in car analogy terms:
If one guy tailgates you and then passes you on the right, he's an asshole.
If 50 people tailgate you and then pass you on the right, take a goddamn hint.
That's the first car analogy that I've seen actually not be fallacious posted to /. Congrats!
A new report concludes that the use of eyewitness accounts need tighter control, and among its recommendations is a call for a more scientific approach to how eyewitnesses identify suspects during the classic police lineup.
The whole lineup process is usually rigged, and can easily be rigged to single out an individual from a pack of "suspects". The lineup is the problem as that tool can too easily be manipulated to garner eyewitness testimony from someone that only "thinks" that's the person they saw and is then coached to say they are "positive" that's the person they saw. And yes, I like the example noted above of "My Cousin Vinny". It's somewhat comically presented, but the fact is people have been wrongfully convicted from dubious "eyewitness testimony" for centuries! Forensic evidence has been helping to curtail these type of wrongful convictions, but sometimes long after the fact.
It's easy for him to bash the current Regime, especially that crack about pushing harder to keep troops in Iraq. They wanted us GONE. Hell, WE wanted us GONE.
Yep, and they conveniently leave out that W signed the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq in 2008 that got us out, including the time table for doing so.
Awful damned easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. Where was HE when the shit was getting ready to pile up?
Apparently, he was writing a book... because at no time during either of his positions under the Obama administration did I ever hear him say one word about "we must leave troops in Iraq" or anything even close to that. Maybe someone can find a quote or video for me, but this sounds a lot like pandering to a base constituency to buy his book given how popular Obama bashing is these days.
If you've done something to earn that much hate, maybe you ought to take a step back and re-evaluate your position.
Who says he earned it? Trolls and just plain socipathic and psychopathic people don't need reasons to hate. Reason rarely factors into their behavior at all. They hate someone because they have a different viewpoint, or they called a shitty piece of code (possibly written by one of these psychopaths) a shitty piece of code. And from his post I would say that he is definitely re-evaluating his position, much to the loss of the Open Source community.
"And that's all about this topic from me. I have no intentions to ever talk about this again on a public forum." -- LP ... throws bombs at Linus, generalizes, brings race and culture in as pejoratives ... his post is as well written as systemd
Spoken like a true Anonymous Coward. I find it hypocritical of you to throw stones and call someone else a coward while posting as an AC on /.
Likely means they miscalculated all the past prediction models as well. It works BOTH ways. It's called an "equation".
It's also called science, which some people want to nay say as it self corrects its assumptions based on new data. The whole point of scientific theories and models is that they change over time as new information is added. Why people go off on this as if it were proof that science is "wrong" is mind boggling. Even if it is "wrong" as of today, it wasn't wrong based on the information we had before today! New data changes the model and we get a more accurate answer.
A "might" "suggest" gets us no where until that is refined into something more definite.
Correct, which means nay saying is also dubious based on the results of one study. Most rational people, however, tend to err on the side of caution and not the side of apathy. More studies will follow as graduate students build on the previous research and add to the findings. This is how research works. Once a concensus is reached then scietific facts change to incorporate this new data. At that time, anyone is welcome to their dissent of the facts. They are also welcome to a unicorn, a lifetime subscription to Fox News and a flying pig.
Really? Simple thermodynamics must escape you. Heat is energy. That energy once absorbed has to go somewhere. In the case of warming the surface or oceans the heat radiates back toward space (eventually), but a portion is reflected back toward Earth causing a sustainable rise in overall global temperatures due to thickness and composition of the atmosphere. Yes, as the oceans warm up currents change and the whole three dimensional system is thrown out of balance and tries to rebalance itself within the new parameters, much like the air above the oceans and land does. The problem is that new balance may not be suitable for life as we know it to continue and we have mass extinctions and food shortages as a potential outcome. This is all simple Earth Science stuff learned in grade school.
No, 99% safe vaccine is not ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better that disease. It is not even better than disease itself. Will you get yourself vaccinated against AIDS if it has 1% of chance giving you AIDS in first place?
Vaccines are safe to 99.9999% or more. And you always have to put it into context. If Ebola will spread to billions, 99% safe vaccine might be acceptable. If AIDS is perfectly preventable in normal case, even 1:million safety might be not enough. But please be careful with 99% and 'orders of magnitude' in same sentence - there are not that many orders of magnitude in 1:100.
Except we're talking about billions of people, not one hundred, so yes, orders of magnitude and percentages do apply in context. Nice try. And yes, if AIDS had become a pandemic like Ebola threatens to become I would definitely take a 1% chance of getting AIDS if it meant that I would not get AIDS at all should the vaccine work. The bottom line on that is if I didn't get the vaccine the odds of contracting the disease could be much higher than 1% of six billion (and change). Some of us do have the capacity to work with numbers larger than 100, and do floating point math on those numbers in our heads, i.e., we're over the age of 12 years.
That comment should be modded up to 1 million!
Just because your model predicted the outcome of something does not mean your model is accurate.
Correct, but if the model predicts the outcome more than half the time, or up to ninety percent of the time, then it's pretty accurate. It may not be precise, but it is accurate.
Umm, did Vikings make wine? I thought they made mead, which comes from honey, not berries.
One thing is clear from all the data, and you can get the same data online as it is free access and abundant, there is a direct correlation between the rise in fossil fuel use starting with the Industrial Revolution (~1850) and the incremental rise in global average temperatures. Yes, I know, correlation and causation don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, but in this case there is a very strong indicator of cause and effect, beyond a (sane) reasonable doubt. The graph of the two data sets show linear consistency over time with very few outliers. This is why anyone who has actually taken the time to research climate change on their own has come to the conclusion that humans are changing the climate through our burning of fossil fuels. If you disagree you either have money involved in the fight, are burying your head in the sand and hoping it all goes away, or are completely out of touch with reality and need immediate psychiatric care.
So it wasnt going into the oceans before and all of a sudden started going into the oceans all at once? Thus creating a "pause"? Why wasnt the heat going into the oceans before the "pause"?
There are some really simple explanations for this: one, the ocean currents changed (due to changes in the atmospheric climate) forcing more of the warmer water deeper into the ocean than before, two, no one said it was an "all-at-once" thing, and even if they did their perspective on "all-at-once" may be decades where you may be thinking more immediately, three, no one said that the rise in air temperatures WASN'T heating the oceans all along. As a matter of fact the continuing rise in ocean temperature has always been a priority concern to climatologists because of the impact on the entire food chain.
I really see these exploits and publishing their existence as a double edged sword problem. On one hand, as an asministrator of systems I'd like to know immediately that there is an exploit so I can shut down a service, if I can, so it doesn't get exploited before I can patch it. On the other hand if the knowledge of an exploit gets into the public then more people are going to try to exploit systems that may be vulnerable, so keeping it quiet may also be beneficial.
Where do you draw the line, and for what reasons? Heartbleed was a major exploit, but was easily patched in short order, however, how many systems had been exploited before the patch was released and by whom? The same goes for Shellshock, although that exploit wasn't patched before it went public and we still see exploits at work due to bash's abundance.
I lean toward the make-it-publicly-known-ASAP camp as I would want to be able to take proactive measures to mitigate any vulnerability before it was exploited or patched. In some cases (not necessarily the Heartbleed and Shellshock examples) patching may fix the vulnerability, but the system may still be compromised if it has been exploited and the damage is already done; and amy continue until you rebuild the system. If the vulnerability was kept quiet during patch development, not knowing gave the attacker time to get what ever they were after off a compromised system before the patch, and potentially not stop further data theft after the patch.
It's really hard to say which option--to tell or not to tell--is the best course. When a vulnerability is found by a security researcher doesn't necessarily correlate to no infected systems in the wild. Who knows who found it first, a good guy or a bad guy, and there may very well be systems exploited in the wild that a patch has little effect on other than fixing a hole that's already been plumbed out by a bad guy.