The Gaming Den

Maxus wrote: If someone told the Bible Belt that the same part of the Bible which is demands you stone gay people, also tells them that eating pork and half of the kinds of seafood is punishable by death...

Well, there'd be a theological crisis there. Or there would, if religious nuts didn't see any contradiction in this, even though the Levitican Code is pretty clear that you're supposed to follow the whole damn thing.

Well, they'd probably fire back something about Jesus saying that they don't have to eat kosher anymore. Now, they won't say much about him being suspiciously silent about gay people, but will bring up that Paul was vocal on the subject, and blah blah quote mining whatever.

Maxus wrote:Though most of the religious nuts I know like barbecue ribs and gumbo more than they hate gay people. It's plausible if they had to choose one to stick with...

I think this is the core issue. While religion does a lot do define a person, that person's interests and other beliefs also do a lot to define their religion. Boot strapping at its finest!

Stahlseele wrote:But would it still be a spider by then? O.o
Or just a different Kind of Crab?
Also: i did not know that spiders operate on pistons @.@

I was thinking more along the lines of the Goliath Bird-Eating Spider:

The "Anthropologist's Veto" is the idea that absolutely any declarative statement you might want to make about human behavior can have a valid counter example brought up by anthropologists who happen to be familiar with some group or another (usually that group is in Southeast Asia or Oceania, but the principle applies universally). True to form: Cambodian Spider Eaters.

-Username17

Who wants to be a spider farmer when they grow up?

Count Arioch.

Eleven proxies, come at me bro, etc.

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:My tarantula is almost as big as a dinner plate (or almost as big as the average person's face, lol). I didn't think B. smithi got that big...

You know, funnily enough the bigger spiders aren't the ones that freak me out. It's the tiny thumbnail-sized ones.

Sort of like how I love rats, but hate mice. And chihuahuas scare me more than most larger dogs. Those tiny lizards you see skitter across windowsills? Creepy as hell.

Anyone else has this selective wussiness towards animals?

only to anything that has more than 4 legs . .

RobbyPants wrote:

Maxus wrote: If someone told the Bible Belt that the same part of the Bible which is demands you stone gay people, also tells them that eating pork and half of the kinds of seafood is punishable by death...

Well, there'd be a theological crisis there. Or there would, if religious nuts didn't see any contradiction in this, even though the Levitican Code is pretty clear that you're supposed to follow the whole damn thing.

Well, they'd probably fire back something about Jesus saying that they don't have to eat kosher anymore. Now, they won't say much about him being suspiciously silent about gay people, but will bring up that Paul was vocal on the subject, and blah blah quote mining whatever.

Maxus wrote:Though most of the religious nuts I know like barbecue ribs and gumbo more than they hate gay people. It's plausible if they had to choose one to stick with...

I think this is the core issue. While religion does a lot do define a person, that person's interests and other beliefs also do a lot to define their religion. Boot strapping at its finest!

Though it's I bit late I'll weigh in on this issue. Acts 10:1-11:18 can be read as saying Christians are need not keep kosher. It also gives "biblical literalists" a way to weasel out of a lot of Leviticus that they dislike. It's a horrific bastardization of scripture but biblical literalism was invented to defend slavery so this should surprise noone.

For more reading Fred Clark has written quite a bit about this topic.

Also on the topic of faith Unitarian Universalists have grown by 15%.
So apparently the conservatives are full of shit when the talk about how progressive churches are doomed to failure.

K wrote:ISPs are going to be tracking copyright-infringement, so finish up your torrents if you want to use the internets from now on.

Comcast has been doing that for a long time. I'd like to know how this is different.

Edit: The notices get punitive.

Maj wrote:

K wrote:ISPs are going to be tracking copyright-infringement, so finish up your torrents if you want to use the internets from now on.

Comcast has been doing that for a long time. I'd like to know how this is different.

Edit: The notices get punitive.

How do they do it? Do they say "we see that you've been using a torrent and that's bad?" Or do you say stuff like "we know that you watched season 4 of Dexter on this European site, so stop it."

Most of them do it the exact same way colleges do it. Someone outside the ISP/college connects to an illegal torrent and starts recording IP's. They see what ISP's those IP's belong to, and if the ISP in question is cooperative with DMCA notifications they send them. Until now, most ISP's told those people to go fuck themself because they aren't a legal authority, they're just dudes and it's just a case of "I said they said." (Unless I'm mistaken, Comcast has an on-and-off again history of throttling torrent traffic directly.)

The primary purpose of this Industry-ISP alliance is to be able to accuse and punish you for DMCA violations without government involvement, because court is prohibitively expensive. So they've strong-armed ISP's into side-stepping the judicial process and letting industry representatives act as judge, jury, and executioner with the lessened stakes of service termination.

It's corporate vigilantism.

I'd like my Comcast provider-overlords more if they wore a Batman costume.

Shrug. Those safe-harbor provisions have been in the DMCA since 1998. Most of the website and ISP "terms and conditions" that you click through without reading have a bit about escalating warnings for repeat copyright infringers, and have had that warning for years.

Whatever wrote:Shrug. Those safe-harbor provisions have been in the DMCA since 1998. Most of the website and ISP "terms and conditions" that you click through without reading have a bit about escalating warnings for repeat copyright infringers, and have had that warning for years.

The news-worthy part of this has nothing to do with the ToS, which have always been shitty (and really don't do that well in court, besides, depending on what part of the country you're in). It's that massive media companies are getting together to create an automated platform for blacklisting people, and other companies are using that blacklist to fine and ban customers. That the blacklist happens to be about a criminal activity is essentially meaningless, because they are explicitly and deliberately not accusing you of any crime or wrongdoing in any court and instead convincing other businesses to punish you for appearing on their blacklist.

They are taking intellectual property law out of the hands of government and putting it into the hands of the decisions of a corporate oligarchy. It looks vaguely legitimate because the corporate oligarchy is only currently punishing things that happen to be illegal, but they aren't actually restricted to only punishing things that would be illegal in a court of law and they certainly aren't restraining themself to proving you guilty of a crime or taking you to civil court before taking action against you.

A bunch of special interests are getting together and leveraging their overwhelming monopolies to force you to participate in their personal clown courts.

DSMatticus wrote:They are taking intellectual property law out of the hands of government and putting it into the hands of the decisions of a corporate oligarchy. It looks vaguely legitimate because the corporate oligarchy is only currently punishing things that happen to be illegal, but they aren't actually restricted to only punishing things that would be illegal in a court of law and they certainly aren't restraining themself to proving you guilty of a crime or taking you to civil court before taking action against you.

A bunch of special interests are getting together and leveraging their overwhelming monopolies to force you to participate in their personal clown courts.

Well already, any time they do actually make a court case out of it, they specifically make sure not to make it a criminal case. Because that involves:
[*]Getting the police to investigate it rather than the murderer they'd rather catch - and they need to get a warrant for that.
[*]Finding evidence that shows beyond reasonable doubt that it was you - if "Someone used this wireless connection to pirate stuff" is the best they have, that's not good enough to go to trial.
[*]Having the court actually look at the cost of the stuff you pirated, then setting a jail term and/or damages based on this. Even if they say "You pirated 10 songs, each from a separate CD, we're making you pay the cost of individual CDs, so that's $300" that's smaller than what they want.

By not actually treating piracy as a crime (despite all the ads telling you it's a crime), they can just put the burden of proof on you, and then be awarded damages of eleventy billion dollars. The only part where they use the actual criminal courts and such is where they strongarm the US police into charging into other countries (NZ) to arrest people for them and put pressure on to get illegal court cases going (Sweden).

Lord Mistborn wrote:

RobbyPants wrote:Well, they'd probably fire back something about Jesus saying that they don't have to eat kosher anymore. Now, they won't say much about him being suspiciously silent about gay people, but will bring up that Paul was vocal on the subject, and blah blah quote mining whatever.

Though it's I bit late I'll weigh in on this issue. Acts 10:1-11:18 can be read as saying Christians are need not keep kosher. It also gives "biblical literalists" a way to weasel out of a lot of Leviticus that they dislike. It's a horrific bastardization of scripture but biblical literalism was invented to defend slavery so this should surprise noone.

Jesus is on record saying that people aren't made unclean by what goes into their mouth, but by what comes out of it. There is a scriptural justification for getting rid of the kosher laws from Leviticus. My broader point is that there is a scriptural justification for about anything you want in the Bible, if you quote-mine it enough.

Which is fucking weird, because I'm pretty sure if I eat rotten meat, and am then violently ill, I was made sick not by the vomiting but by the eating of rotten meat.

I get that this was in regards to influences vs actions (and could be interpreted to mean "Look at porn, it's no big deal. And God says it's okay to play Quake 3. Just make sure you're nice to other people when you finish up."), but when using a metaphor, you want to use one that's actually correct.

@K - In the past, their notices have looked something like this.

Koumei wrote:Which is fucking weird, because I'm pretty sure if I eat rotten meat, and am then violently ill, I was made sick not by the vomiting but by the eating of rotten meat.

Well, you can find out in Greece, because it is now legal to sell expired food there.

-Username17

Why ... why would you shoot a skunk in the first place?

"OH MY GOD! IT'S COMING RIGHT FOR US!"
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/1 ... ght-for-us

Sir Neil wrote:Why ... why would you shoot a skunk in the first place?

Because rednecks. I grew up in a rural area, and some of the folk there would make Charlton Heaston himself question the second amendment. Hell, my dad said that last summer where I live now, there were sightings of a bobcat around town, and some loud redneck in the local pub was bragging about how he was "gonna kill that sonuvabitch". Rednecks kill things for no reason, that's what they do.