Oh totally, dude. We should also forcefully accept and recognize marriage between people and cattle, because it's like such a none-of-our-business sort of thing, right? If the cattle are ok and the people want it, who are we to object to the desecration of an institution the world at large has held sacred for thousands of years?
I mean, we don't want to be making the same mistakes as those slave-traders do we?
Marriage was around long before any of the major religions of today
Very well, but whatever defintion in any culture you consider is a definition drawn from the governing principles held in that culture, and these are also religious even in ancient times. Saying that it predates the 3 main versions of monotheism today does not mean that our world societies, which derive much of their principles of morality(hence law) from culture/faith, should forget their ideals and collapse their principles.
Most gays don't try to engage in "civil union", and those that want to live together should not force society to accept a definition of something that it finds disgusting/unacceptable. The law represents the principles of the people as a whole, which is why U.S law doesn't abide by a single faith. Nobody should be oppressed for what they are, but this is different: you are asking people to acknowledge something - something they are very strongly against - as their own stance.
This instinctive repulsion is in every country, every people on earth. I know that sounds prejudiced, but it's true. I personally don't care much if a man allows another to dominate him by sexually penetrating his digestive tract. I really don't. But you can't ask me to recognize that their "union" is something related to the sacred concept of marriage, be it marriage in any culture. Marriage is what society as a whole recognizes, not what you or I believe it to be.
Very nicely written. More importantly though, it is crucial to realize that we cannot win in Iraq because victory is not defined to be anything realistic or satisfactory.
What would G.W call a victory? A stable country? There never will be a stable country given sectarian divides and a lust for power, with or without American troops. Saddam kept it stable using tyranny to repress the Shiite desire to rule (the doctrines of that sect are political by nature). We cannot do the same. In addition, we cannot be satisfied with stability if it involves a shiite theocracy that crushes the other groups into submission.
Weird thing about dictatorships is: people come to accept them, to be content with them. War wakes the ambitions in people up. To succeed, we need to crush those ambitions and force our version of "democratic" government on the citizens, then be ready to go back and do it again if needed.
Of course, that is a kind of success we could do without.
What? Nudity in movies is the source of originality? I'm against censorship for the most part, but you're off the tracks there mate. There's a reason why hollywood productions are dubbed kiss-kiss-bang-bang, and the meaningless use of sex + explosions + bad language is the reason movies get boring.
That said, kids(10+) should be exposed to a little violence and real life. If not, they will find it on the street, or in school, or on YouTube, and when they do their reaction will not be what the protective parent would have hoped for.
that Verizon supervisor could be making more money then you. The world is a harsh, harsh place.
And George, if they say you were quoted 0.002 cents and insist on it, then capitalize on that dammit!. You keep trying to get them to do the math..don't.
Since most FPS games involving Germany have our boys killing loads of Jerries, the dude could understandably be pissed. I'm surprised he didn't use the word "terrorist" to describe those dang gamers.
I hope the US never does anything stupid like, say - invade another nation, prompting hundreds of future games where Yanks get their asses kicked. Oh wait.
I'm losing a lot of my respect for the folks at NIST. They are more detached from the concerns of the educated public than I could have imagined:
"You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware"
Uh, yes? Isn't that, like, exactly what everybody has been yelling for since the last election? In fact, we were all suggesting far more stringent requirements than just paper trails, but it appears that Freedom has lower budgets than we anticipated.
its that we put together a system that works, and then promptly stopped caring about anyone else in the world but ourselves
Actually, if we left everyone alone we wouldn't be hated this much. Our interventions/invasions on the private matters of various peoples around the world have earned us a reputation for being a country that believes its way of life is impeccable enough to be forced on any culture at the slightest excuse.
There was a time not far back (Kosovo?), when our military was envisioned as a force of justice and our nation was known for it's friendliness and spirit.
Actually, finding life is very difficult because the necessary conditions for the formation of a single celled organism only exist with very low possibilities.
Keep in mind that we have never manufactured a single living cell with functional DNA in a lab even with conditions entirely under our human control. Pasteur's Law still holds today. If we can't use thousands of years of engineering, including at least 2 decades of advanced bio-medical technology, to manufacture a single funcional cell from non-organic material, do you really expect it to form arbitrarily in space all the time?
We are the product of an extremely unlikely physical/chemical event, and we may very well be alone.
Is is not possible to have a system where you can check your vote later? If the paper produced has a unique barcode/ID per vote, and you keep your paper for later, there should be a way you could check your own vote electronically from another outlet later.
Yes, but other nations have hundreds on nukes at the ready, and it only takes a single failure/gap in our defenses to send the entire east or west coast to heaven. Of course it will never happen(fear is the key), but it technically can. The world can be over in 20 minutes, and all the military ego on earth isn't going to help you in that sort of situation.
How many families really sit down and watch programs togetherand when they do, how many actually communicate during them
As a fellow geek I would love to join this parade, but you are wrong. Families do get together over T.V, even if it's just for the news or the odd movie. Television is a culture, to the extent that some people cannot initiate conversation without having something flashing on the tube. The online streaming thing is an entirely different world: you are connected to many people who may share your interests but who you interact with through playback controls. They are not real. I mean of course they are, but they are real only in the microcosm of existence that is your online experience.
If you do not have a family, there can be little difference (most of my comp.sci mates watch their shows from their PC/laptop) but if you are in a household where everybody is shut off in their room staring into their monitors and the static buzzing from their headphones, then you know something is not right.
Sometimes it's good to fight over the channels. And remember, this is coming from a Computer Science grad student, not your aunt.
This seems to work when the differences among moral philosophies of people are so great that only a general middle-ground "law" will please everybody.
In other places, where religious or cultural identity is strong throughout the population, morality dictates the law, because there is nobody who thinks otherwise(to the pervalent moral code), at least nobody who matters. If you think about it, there has to be a single "point of view" adopted in the end. In the US it's the summation of most people's desires, or a law that the majority doesn't dislike too much. Elsewhere, it's God's word. In China, it's the state's law, which is inevitably drawn from culture plus Marxist ideals.
That's why it's good to be in the US of A. Since everybody is different, the moral principle is you, and law is usually defined accordingly.
that this is on/. is that a radioactive substance was involved in the assasination. Isn't that a little scary - the thought that the newsworthiness of the murder to nerds is supposed to be the polonium and not the human life or the state of the world today?
Or you could use the "recovered" energy to power the processor fan, thus creating an automatic temp.control(if it is hot, fan will get juice, otherwise fan dies).
I still doubt they will ever produce enough power for a nice 3000RPM bad boy like the one buzzing in my case now.
Slashdot Mirror
But sharing a prize with a few odd million video bloggers is also... lame.
If TIME gets slashdotted it will be poetic justice.
Oh totally, dude. We should also forcefully accept and recognize marriage between people and cattle, because it's like such a none-of-our-business sort of thing, right? If the cattle are ok and the people want it, who are we to object to the desecration of an institution the world at large has held sacred for thousands of years?
I mean, we don't want to be making the same mistakes as those slave-traders do we?
Marriage was around long before any of the major religions of today
Very well, but whatever defintion in any culture you consider is a definition drawn from the governing principles held in that culture, and these are also religious even in ancient times. Saying that it predates the 3 main versions of monotheism today does not mean that our world societies, which derive much of their principles of morality(hence law) from culture/faith, should forget their ideals and collapse their principles.
Most gays don't try to engage in "civil union", and those that want to live together should not force society to accept a definition of something that it finds disgusting/unacceptable. The law represents the principles of the people as a whole, which is why U.S law doesn't abide by a single faith.
Nobody should be oppressed for what they are, but this is different: you are asking people to acknowledge something - something they are very strongly against - as their own stance.
This instinctive repulsion is in every country, every people on earth. I know that sounds prejudiced, but it's true. I personally don't care much if a man allows another to dominate him by sexually penetrating his digestive tract. I really don't. But you can't ask me to recognize that their "union" is something related to the sacred concept of marriage, be it marriage in any culture. Marriage is what society as a whole recognizes, not what you or I believe it to be.
Oh, and fuck you McCain!
Very nicely written. More importantly though, it is crucial to realize that we cannot win in Iraq because victory is not defined to be anything realistic or satisfactory.
What would G.W call a victory? A stable country? There never will be a stable country given sectarian divides and a lust for power, with or without American troops. Saddam kept it stable using tyranny to repress the Shiite desire to rule (the doctrines of that sect are political by nature). We cannot do the same. In addition, we cannot be satisfied with stability if it involves a shiite theocracy that crushes the other groups into submission.
Weird thing about dictatorships is: people come to accept them, to be content with them. War wakes the ambitions in people up. To succeed, we need to crush those ambitions and force our version of "democratic" government on the citizens, then be ready to go back and do it again if needed.
Of course, that is a kind of success we could do without.
What? Nudity in movies is the source of originality? I'm against censorship for the most part, but you're off the tracks there mate. There's a reason why hollywood productions are dubbed kiss-kiss-bang-bang, and the meaningless use of sex + explosions + bad language is the reason movies get boring.
That said, kids(10+) should be exposed to a little violence and real life. If not, they will find it on the street, or in school, or on YouTube, and when they do their reaction will not be what the protective parent would have hoped for.
that Verizon supervisor could be making more money then you. The world is a harsh, harsh place.
And George, if they say you were quoted 0.002 cents and insist on it, then capitalize on that dammit!. You keep trying to get them to do the math..don't.
Since most FPS games involving Germany have our boys killing loads of Jerries, the dude could understandably be pissed. I'm surprised he didn't use the word "terrorist" to describe those dang gamers.
I hope the US never does anything stupid like, say - invade another nation, prompting hundreds of future games where Yanks get their asses kicked.
Oh wait.
Someone once told me a similar theory about syphilis (maybe thinking about it raises the risk! ). I think they died.
I'm losing a lot of my respect for the folks at NIST. They are more detached from the concerns of the educated public than I could have imagined:
"You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware"
Uh, yes? Isn't that, like, exactly what everybody has been yelling for since the last election? In fact, we were all suggesting far more stringent requirements than just paper trails, but it appears that Freedom has lower budgets than we anticipated.
its that we put together a system that works, and then promptly stopped caring about anyone else in the world but ourselves
Actually, if we left everyone alone we wouldn't be hated this much. Our interventions/invasions on the private matters of various peoples around the world have earned us a reputation for being a country that believes its way of life is impeccable enough to be forced on any culture at the slightest excuse.
There was a time not far back (Kosovo?), when our military was envisioned as a force of justice and our nation was known for it's friendliness and spirit.
Actually, finding life is very difficult because the necessary conditions for the formation of a single celled organism only exist with very low possibilities.
Keep in mind that we have never manufactured a single living cell with functional DNA in a lab even with conditions entirely under our human control. Pasteur's Law still holds today. If we can't use thousands of years of engineering, including at least 2 decades of advanced bio-medical technology, to manufacture a single funcional cell from non-organic material, do you really expect it to form arbitrarily in space all the time?
We are the product of an extremely unlikely physical/chemical event, and we may very well be alone.
or something.
to really hate somebody's guts, to spend your whole life trying to beat them, then in the end some clown says you're gay and sleeping together?
Is is not possible to have a system where you can check your vote later? If the paper produced has a unique barcode/ID per vote, and you keep your paper for later, there should be a way you could check your own vote electronically from another outlet later.
For the non engineers like me... what does this mean in practical usage?
Ummm...PORN!
Really, the questions people ask. Sheesh.
It's probably 100.42 degrees.
Yes, but other nations have hundreds on nukes at the ready, and it only takes a single failure/gap in our defenses to send the entire east or west coast to heaven. Of course it will never happen(fear is the key), but it technically can. The world can be over in 20 minutes, and all the military ego on earth isn't going to help you in that sort of situation.
How many families really sit down and watch programs togetherand when they do, how many actually communicate during them
As a fellow geek I would love to join this parade, but you are wrong. Families do get together over T.V, even if it's just for the news or the odd movie. Television is a culture, to the extent that some people cannot initiate conversation without having something flashing on the tube. The online streaming thing is an entirely different world: you are connected to many people who may share your interests but who you interact with through playback controls. They are not real. I mean of course they are, but they are real only in the microcosm of existence that is your online experience.
If you do not have a family, there can be little difference (most of my comp.sci mates watch their shows from their PC/laptop) but if you are in a household where everybody is shut off in their room staring into their monitors and the static buzzing from their headphones, then you know something is not right.
Sometimes it's good to fight over the channels. And remember, this is coming from a Computer Science grad student, not your aunt.
Sorry..please ignore. He actually posted the link this time so you don't have to go through the blog.
Real link to NIST summary (and pic)
This seems to work when the differences among moral philosophies of people are so great that only a general middle-ground "law" will please everybody.
In other places, where religious or cultural identity is strong throughout the population, morality dictates the law, because there is nobody who thinks otherwise(to the pervalent moral code), at least nobody who matters. If you think about it, there has to be a single "point of view" adopted in the end. In the US it's the summation of most people's desires, or a law that the majority doesn't dislike too much. Elsewhere, it's God's word. In China, it's the state's law, which is inevitably drawn from culture plus Marxist ideals.
That's why it's good to be in the US of A. Since everybody is different, the moral principle is you, and law is usually defined accordingly.
that this is on /. is that a radioactive substance was involved in the assasination. Isn't that a little scary - the thought that the newsworthiness of the murder to nerds is supposed to be the polonium and not the human life or the state of the world today?
I feel uncomfortable.
I thought the French were all going straight to Hell.
Or you could use the "recovered" energy to power the processor fan, thus creating an automatic temp.control(if it is hot, fan will get juice, otherwise fan dies).
I still doubt they will ever produce enough power for a nice 3000RPM bad boy like the one buzzing in my case now.
If he hadn't intended you nitwits to be seen, he would have given me mod points.