I agree that there's the difference of book or not, but frankly speaking, most christians known only the summary version of their holy book and never actually read it, so the difference is, again mostly semantical.

That christians today don't want to kill unbelievers and heretics anymore has little to do with christianity itself and a lot with the enlightenment and the secularisation of society and politics.

I've heard that so often, it's time to burn the strawman.

In "such situations" (red flag right there - vague specification), only the pre-planned, very bad guys with proper resources and connections are armed like the military.

Most bad guys are lacking either the resources or the connections or the patience to jump through all the hoops that you need to jump through to acquire, say, an assault rifle illegally. In my country, which has strict gun controls, very few crimes involve weapons of any kind, and in those that do the weapon is almost always either a knife or a pistol. That means regular police can engage the criminal.

Semantically correct, but the step is so thin it's not a surprise so many christians throughout history thought otherwise.

If you know (not suspect or think, but know by divine message from the creator himself) that everyone who doesn't join your faith is doomed to eternal suffering in this world and the next, and their children and their children as well, you either feel a strong impulse to teach them the "truth", or you're not really serious about it.

This.

Or maybe someone should just fork islam and create a non-violent branch that kicks out all the "kill them for..." parts. OTOH, that is also long overdue for christianity.

Like it or not, there are different types of extremism.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6ccC...

That's half a joke, and half true. In some circles, you are considered an extremist if you are rude to others while addressing whatever the issue is. In other circles, you're not an extremist if you kill people over the issue, only if, say, they were children.

They may or may not be cowards, but unless they are stupid, they would simply choose a different target - a day care center or a school, for example.

If you think guns make you more safe, you're an idiot. The numbers are in and the differences between comparable countries are tiny. The main factors in safety have nothing to do with gun ownership.

And here, mass shootings tend to only take place in areas that prohibit or have severely curtailed the carrying of firearms.

LK

It is apparently normal that organisations for social change attract extremists, and many of these organisations fail to guard against the takeover by people who are just more fanatical, and thus dedicated. I've witnessed the same with the german Pirate Party, which used to be about digital rights, and nobody cared. Then it got a few percents at some elections and appeared on the radar. These days, it is about feminism, drug policy, political refugees, city planning and whatever other pet topic some troll pushed through.

Greenpeace always had this activism thing and at the time when the public largely didn't care about the environment, that was probably the right thing to do, to get attention. But as with all things, you have to continuously make it bigger to get headlines again, especially if you have reached your goal and people do pay attention already. And if you go more and more extreme, sooner or later something will break. People die (already happened), or things like this.

What an opportunity to give the unnecessary ad hominem back. The key-word was "experiment". The point is not that this is how software development be, but that teaching people to think first, then design correctly, then implement is the proper approach instead of the "tinkerer" one where you write down what comes to mind and then tinker with it until the compiler is happy.

That, exactly, is how all these errors that the compiler doesn't catch happen.

The experiment is not about avoiding compiler errors. If you thought it was, you didn't understand it one bit.

How does it handle dynamic sites? If the answer is "not at all" as with previous projects of this kind, it's dead on arrival.

Most of the web is dynamic today, and almost all of the interesting sites are. How many of us would be reading /. if it didn't have comments and moderation?

There were ads on TPB? Fuck, now I can't even turn off ABE to check it out.

This. I can't remember the last time I downloaded music from a torrent site. It's more convenient these days to buy it on iTunes, and prices are fair.

When the same can be said for movies, and the MPAA stops this staggered release bullshit, I'll start buying movies again the same way I bought a lot of DVDs back when that was the most convenient way to get movies.

Which world is that you live in? Religion still carries much more credit than its performance record justifies. The pope is invited to parliaments and international diplomacy as if he was somehow especially smart or important. Even the Dalai Lama is given special respect for purely religious reasons. Churches enjoy special priviledges in many countries, with tax exemption being just the tip of the iceberg.

The simple fact is that the human brain and psychology has evolved little from tribal society and we believe or disbelieve a lot of things not due to facts or evidence, but due to group pressure, conformity, tales, authority as well as shortcuts in thinking, heuristical approaches and so on. Religion is just one example of that, superstition also still exists even though religion has already tried to root it out for a thousand years.

Which is why you should learn to write code that compiles and works correctly on the first try. We know how to do it, computer science wasn't invented yesterday. But thanks to dot-com and startup craze and the desire to churn out pseudo-programmers fast, fast, fast, programming isn't taught correctly.

If you want army style, I suggest this experiment: Teach students to code in a simple text editor and a special compiler that gives them one chance at compiling the program. If the compile fails, it deletes the code and they can start from scratch.

Only if you hire monkeys to do your programming for you.

This is a very famous article about how to do programming right. Note their error count. Compare it to pretty much everything else on the market.

But programming this way isn't sexy, or macho or whatever else you want to call it. It's real work.

It depends on the environment. If other people are good and willing to defend their values, the bad guys will be in trouble. But if they manage to convince the majority to be either lethargic or even respect them, then the good people are the dumb losers.

And we are in that situation. Wake up, man! We admire rich people simply because they are rich, not for the ways they became so. We increasingly believe the war-talk of neo-con propaganda that unemployed people just need to be forced more strongly to want to work, and that benefits need to be cut because the poor are parasites. There was no blood in the streets when our governments bailed out the finance sector with so much money that it's hard to visualize while at the same time cutting budgets in education, health care and practically everything else.

You forget that the unethical (actually, "differently ethical" is correct here, because they believe themselves to be ethical, I'm sure) people also have long-term strategies. And they're winning.

Are they still in business? If so, your rant is meaningless.