The reason Leviticus is used as an excuse to persecute homosexuals is because people are inherently uncomfortable with sexual concepts, and being homosexual is the current taboo. The bible repeatedly makes it clear that any whitelist/blacklist of rights/wrongs (slashdot should understand those words) is not the intent of the laws or any acceptable standard of behavior. Unfortunately, this doesn't prevent people from saying "hah! look there! that's not ok!" or "well nothing says I'm not allowed to do this..." as if somehow the authors of the books were trying to present some kind of uncaring legalistic code of conduct. For example:

You can go your whole life without killing someone, and still be guilty of murder according to biblical philosophy. Basically, anyone who tries to use the bible as a way to slander homosexuals is only airing their own prejudices and has misunderstood the entire biblical presentation of what makes a person decent, which is your intentions and caring (not as easy a standard as you might think though), but nothing like "do X and you'll be a good/bad person".

It was added to the US constitution because state governments were unable to implement copy laws. If someone had copy protection in one state, then someone else could just ignore the copy law in another state.

Which leads to one among many arguments against copy law: it requires universal government to implement it. That should be a nail in the coffin of any legal policy.

No. It wasn't.

No, it really isn't.

Christianity advocates persuasion and being an example. "Fundamentalist" christianity is actually very peaceful. That doesn't prevent very unpeaceful people from trying to commandeer a philosophy's good reputation and use it for to try to conquer others, but those types of people will use anything they can get their hands on.

Whoa. They had quality testers?

Do you actually believe that there is no exercise of force involved on the part of the state? The force to physically kidnap a person to interrogate them? The force to keep them from leaving an interrogation? The force being threatened during the interrogation? The force of killing someone who ultimately won't comply? And yes, governments will ultimately kill you if you don't comply, no matter how trivial their complaint is. It goes (1) government complaint (2) refuse to pay fine (3) refuse to go to jail (4) killed.

The police are under assault. That's what happens when your job is violence and you don't have public support. It's one of the reasons why the principles of a republic are so important: if a bunch of self righteous crusaders in 27 states get marijuana outlawed across all 50 states, then in 23 states you end up with a police force enforcing laws that the local people do not want enforced. And so you get LA gangs and and no one defending their local police and they do indeed "come under assault". But they should be under assault. They should be very afraid to enforce laws that will make them unpopular.

Sorry to be a bit rude, but you make it sound like you live in a world where cops enforce the law with smiles. And sorry to have to be that guy, but the police are the violent (combative) arm of governments and no choice of vocabulary will change that.

To call them gendarme rather than the soldiers of foreign tyrants is quite an amusing choice of words. It's a choice of words I doubt you would use when talking to the families who are abused by foreign soldiers and have no realistic means of defense or justice against them.

My point (that I realize no one will agree with because it's like trying to explain what's wrong with slavery to a slave owner) is that war will always create these situations, and it is what one is supporting when he supports war. Of course, in some cases war is preferable to a peaceful slavery, but pretending that war can be pleasant by using words like "gendarme" is a luxury of a country that sends war to other countries and hasn't had to pay for it locally yet.

That seems to me a bit like saying "don't hold the arms and legs responsible for what the brain is ordering them to do". Why not hold them responsible? Sometimes you have to kill some pawns to get to the king, and in this case, perfectly willing voluntary pawns. We can hold everyone responsible for their own choices, there is no limit to the blame that can be passed around.

Did you really think the soldier did what they did because they wanted information? Nonsense. They did it because they are soldiers, and killing people nonchalantly is what soldiers' occupation is.

Saying that you'll deal with the brutality of soldiers in interrogations by sending in specialists is completely ignoring my point. When you are constantly sending soldiers in to other people's neighborhoods, you are responsible for them doing what soldiers will always do. Advocating for a specialists is like arguing "well, rape here is a major problem, but that's only because rapists aren't trained to gather information. We'll send in some professional hookers, and when they do it to you, then you'll enjoy it".

Send in as many specialists as you want. The soldiers thought the guy was a god damn taxi driver and tortured him to death anyway. This is what you vote for when you keep voting for "this isn't really a war" candidates.

That's strange. Nowhere in the constitution that I read did it mention that the government's job was to protect the safety of anyone, much less that protecting safety was a justification of exercise of unconstitutional government power.

But then again there seems to be this version of the constitution floating around that everyone else is using that I can't seem to get a copy of. Maybe it's on pirate bay. Oh wait that got temporarily shut down again...

Bullshit. VLSI code is almost always verified by finite models, and many processors are verified down to the level of mathematical axiom. Provably correct software code exists in small amounts, and it's emergence is inevitable.

Sometimes when trying to explain verified software I say "This is a correct program. It might not be the correct program you intended it to be, but your code is objectively not any correct program."

God I hope you aren't American. Because to any objective observer, it is the US who is terrorizing everyone else's neighborhoods. Do you apply the same standard to yourself?

Damn. This is why the US being forever at war is so disgusting. This is what happens when you send soldiers on bully missions.