I would argue that that's true of all religions, and everybody. If you can show me an entirely internally consistent religion and a person who follows 100% of those teachings exactly, I would be shocked! Everybody emphasizes whatever part of the scripture they want and ignore other parts. Some conservative Christians glide past the "Do not judge" part and spend a lot of time focusing on sexual immorality! Some liberal Christians glide past the many parts of the new testament that deal with sexual immorality and spend a lot more time with the "do not judge" part! That's just religion for you. Remember, even a religion as seemingly peaceful as Buddhism had adherents who really perfected the modern concept of the suicide bomber.

Personally, I was offended when President Obama attempted to define what true Islam was, and who was a true Muslim and who was a faker. How colonialist of him to attempt to be the arbiter and definer of native religion!

I think you're partially right and partially wrong. The issue is that Islam to a very large degree overlaps with parts of the world that have maintained pre-modern tribal ties to a degree that most of us in the east and west are no longer familiar with. Thus, in Afghanistan, it's not that the fundamentalists aren't united, but that many tribal coalitions have been unified through fundamentalist Islam.

I don't. We could have a nearly infinite discussion about the history of Islam, the history of the Middle East, the rise of the West, and the economic and social morass of much of the Islamic world. We would actually probably end up agreeing about a lot of these things! Militant fundamentalism used to be a part of Christianity, but was stamped out a long time ago. Militant fundamentalism in Islam has yet to be eradicated. If you think the trappings of Caliphate, the revival of the 'Uthman dinar and other potent symbols of early Islam, and the persecution of historical enemies exist in a vacuum, I think you're very wrong.

Have you ever heard a evangelical Christian Bible study or lesson? It's interesting. They will focus to an incredible degree on each word of the verse they are studying. They will talk about the word in the original Greek (or Aramaic, etc.) and its connotations, how it compares to other Biblical accounts, etc. We're talking nitty gritty minutia and some interesting historical analysis. BUT, they also start with the inviolable precondition that the Bible is the literal word of God and divinely inspired. So, forget any line of reasoning like "Maybe Paul said XYZ because of his Jewish heritage and don't forget that the Roman governor had been stamping down on ABC, so if the early Christians wanted to avoid being persecuted, they had to act this way." The correct answer is always "Because God."

Same for ISIS. They are VERY grounded in history, but they are very one dimensional. Belittling (or disregarding the validity of) their beliefs is a huge mistake, however.

Something similar. Took almost an entire ISP down. Had a few servers with about 200 domains running bsd located at thier "data center " which was more like a couple shelve and a long bench. Anyways, they where supposed to be running a script to verify two servers were mirroring the other two. I got lazy and stopped checking the logs for it and eventually they stopped running the backups or the script to verify it. One day a drive failed and about 50 domains were off line. I couldn't remote into any server and started getting a run around from their techs so i loaded up all the backup servers i had and a file share with copies of everthing and drove the 200 miles to the isp.

Turns out one of their techs tried to fix the problem by pulling a good drive from one of the other boxes but wasn't the one mirroring the bad drive. This then caused issues in the raid for the good box which he tried to rebuild by pulling the a drive from the mirroring box and ended up breaking all the configs. The worse part is that he thought he had the right tools to fix everything at home and instead of going to get them, he loaded my servers up and took them home.

So i show up, realize i have to start from scratch, set up a couple makeshift boxes that likely wouldn't survive a month, then i connected an old NetWare server. I enabled SMB on the two new servers and started transferring files from the NetWare server. Next thing i know, someone came in and started rebooting all the routers. I looked and jokingly said a reboot is not a fix.

Well, this went on for about two hours with about half a dozen people working on it, making phone calls and claiming they were under some DOS attack. My file transfer was finished, i disconnected the NetWare server, and it all magically stopped. I had misconfigured the SMB and created a packet storm that their routers and modems gladly repeated and multiplied to the point it almost melted their network.

My real servers finally showed back up so i loaded them up, built new ones and had a t3 ran to a commercial building near the house that became their new home. There was a lot of finger pointing and talk about compensation but it got dropped when i reminded them that the only reason i had access of that kind was because they failed to fulfill a contract obligations and then screwed the pooch trying to recover.

And there's a problem with your concept too. You do not know god doesn't exist. All you know is that you have not been convinced that one or more God's exist or existed at any time. And no, saying if god exists do X to prove it does not mean one doesn't exist when X doesn't happen any more than i wouldn't exist if you demanded i took a dump on your door step while you sleep as proof i exist and i didn't.

The worse part. In your fervor to proclaim a scientific untruth (science cannot prove a god doesn't exist, only that one is not needed ), you miss the entire point of the clause. However you were created, a common inborn desire of man is to strive for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness which is not limited to a select few born into the right families or royalties , or bestowed upon by some king or whatever for the success or pursuit in those goals.

All through human history, this is a desire of the human race. Choices and ideas on how to achieve it varies, but it has been present. People naturally desire it. The fact that they were created (in however that came about ) means this exist.

Its because you have no rights to impose on other free people your freedoms and rights outside of what they are willing to allow through contract or good will where the government is bound to not use the force of law to restrict the same.

In other words, my rights do not create an imposition on you and the government cannot take them away. The US constitution recognizes the right already exists and bars government from infringement of it.

Excpet greed is demonstrably good so long as one plays the rational actor in basic game theory. It is only when one plays the consistent bad actor that the impulse of 'greed' becomes a bad thing.

Indeed, there also is a large gap between the viewpoint of the public and economists.

For example, few economists (11%) agree with the statement "'Buy American' has a positive impact on manufacturing employment", whereas 75% of the public feel that way.

94% of economists feel that NAFTA was a good idea, only 46% of the public agree.

Vietnam was a failure because we backed the French in the first place with no incentive on our part, thus breaking the first rule of warfare. Namely, never back the French when led by Frenchmen. Corsicans and women are acceptable. Well, that and because we allowed PR to influence the course of the entire war.

Would you prefer they pretend such devices aren't broken? It's not like they're waving a wand and making them all disappear anyway.

It still wouldn't matter. The other authors can license any way they want as long as it is compatible with your license. In the case of the GPL they can release their software as later version and still push back to your project under your version. You can take your code and release it proprietary and gpl at the same time because it's your code.

I've got to say, I hate the idea that if you join the US you, it's eternal on pain of death. I'm pretty much universally for the devolution of powers and rights to smaller political entity. Just look at countries ranked on the wellness and happiness scales. People have far greater trust in government institutions in smaller countries.

I believe states should be able to secede, regardless of reason. I'm not saying the southern secession followed a good protocol in deciding when to secede, but I think you would be very surprised if you actually read some of the history of how the transition took place. Think about everything that has to switch over. The federal government was far less monstrous 150 years ago, but courthouses, judges, tax officials, military installations, etc, all had a transition to go through. Many were very straightforward. Courthouse employees came to work one day as US employees, the next as Confederates. IMO, once the secession took place, the view of the north was the treason already occurred.

No, completely wrong. Treason can be justified IF YOU WIN, in which case, it's no longer treason.

That's why I was confused! Perhaps you have never actually talked to someone who has a southern accent?

You know how you hate southerners and think southern culture is reprehensible? That's why. I don't support statehouses flying confederate flags, but I sure as crap support retailers, ebay sellers, etc, selling them. I remember being disgusted when I read about how Nazi memorabilia or historical items were banned from resale in Germany--history-avoiding pansies. Well, now here we are. In fact we're worse--you can still buy Nazi gear, but mention of a confederate flag is verboten!

History is written by the victors. We know who the victors in the civil war were. By the time of the civil war war, every one of my ancestors had been in the US for at least one generation. I'm fortunate enough to have the diary one of ancestor who participated in Sherman's march to the sea (he was from Ohio). Completely harrowing stuff. On another side, another ancestor fought for the south at Gettysburg (he was from the high mountains of VA/NC area). He lost six brothers in just two days at Gettysburg and was severely wounded. Interestingly enough, not a single ancestor I have tracked down who fought for the confederacy ever owned slaves (at least that I can tell). Most of them are from the mountains, where slavery was never as big. Slavery was the raison d'etre of the civil war for elite on both sides. That's not why the commoners fight. Commoners never fight for the real reason a war is being fought (or rarely, at least), they fight because they are whipped up into some kind of group-fervor. It's clear that even today the northern/southern culture divide exists and is pretty damn pungent.

They have had kits that do not require a 3d printer for that for a long time now. There are a few different companies offering it. Here are a couple that I know of.

http://www.willykit.com/

http://www.createamate.com/

And I there there is a clone a willy kit somewhere but cannot remember the URL for it. All of these options are much cheaper than a 3d printer and you can put vibrators in them as well as glow in the dark colors and even lights. Lots of fun- just don't make a bunch of them and hand them out in the secret Santa at work next year. Trust me, it's not as fun or funny as you might think.

I saw that number written on the bathroom wall at the club I was at last night. You must get around.

Anyhow, I do not know if the FCC has an 800 number to call and check for flight restrictions. They should. I kind of assumed they did, actually.

If they do, I don't know about it.

Most of the fun for me was making the replica. It's like building models except they work like the real things. My stuff is a lot smaller but I've seen the larger ones in real life. They have them now with Jet engines and speeds that are unreal for a remote controlled unit. Or if anything, they are way beyond my skill levels. When I was into it enough to spend money, the jets were a pipe dream or electric motor with a prop enclosed in a housing to simulate a jet engine. Now they are a reality and actually burn fuel.

As for mounting a gun, of course that wouldn't be legal but we had some mount flour bombs, open bomb bays and drop bugs (beneficial bugs for pest controls in agriculture). I've heard stories of people mounting home made paintball guns. You could do it but I do not know if the air frame would survive the recoil. You could likely get a POV camera mounted to aim it too with all the new fangled electronics they have now. It sounds like it would be fun to try.