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.

Command economies like the USSR, Cuba, and DPRK work poorly in general; but they can concentrate their efforts to excel in specific areas. Thus, the USSR could beat the US in the early days of the space race; but couldn't supply consumer goods very well. Cuba also still operates much like the USSR, with similar problems in daily living. OTOH, they produce a lot of doctors and send them all over the world. Their command economy actually focuses on this. It almost makes you want to like their government. Almost. It isn't hard to see through all that, and if they simply taxed a more efficient market economy they could probably send even more doctors. DPRK? I'm not sure if they excel in anything. Even their feared nuke program is kind of a joke. AFAIK it's just a really sucky command economy; but it wouldn't surprise me if they produced a hand-full of really fantastic pocket watches every year. When you control the output of an entire nation, you can easily direct it disproportionately in one area at the expense of many other things.

In certain parts of Montgomery County, MD I recall they placed DO NOT ENTER signs on streets that were obvious short-cuts. They were usually qualified with rush-hour times. In other words, the signs made them into temporary one-way streets that were against the short-cut direction. That's probably the most cost-effective and least annoying solution. The threat of a moving violation was enough to keep most offenders in check. Local residents are only mildly inconvenienced by having to circle the block. I suppose they could have put "except local traffic", but I think they wanted to keep it simple.

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.

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.

I probably won't own a 3d printer anytime soon; but that doesn't mean never. Let's face it. Sometimes subtractive techniques are better. Something like a 3-d printed rifle is mostly a "because we can" exercise. The best parts for something like that will probably always be milled. I hedged my answer with "probably" because I can see using 3-d printing techniques for non-critical trim parts on some hobby item or household good I might want. 3-d printed window curtain slider...sure, why not? The reasons for not printing such items now are 1. Any affordable printer I've seen shows visible voxelation in the finished product. 2. I don't already have one, so the TCO still favors going to a store and buying parts which are better than anything I could print myself.

These problems might be solved by people that love 3d printing and play with it all the time. I'm just not one of them.

I'm a "spanner" myself. WW2 parents, Gen-X peers. This happens when your WW2 parents don't have you until they hit their 40s. Thus, you skip the entire generation and have some anomalous things going on, such as all your cousins being *adults* while you're growing up. Silly me, aren't cousins always adults? Nope. For most people, those are aunts and uncles, and aunts and uncles aren't so old.

I've run into a few other people with the same "span" and it's always interesting. In some ways, I can relate to boomers more than I do to my peers.

By now, we should have some Millenial "spanners" too--people who skipped Gex-X and grew up with adult Boomer cousins. I have no idea what that'd be like... but maybe we'd both have the common ability to understand that to some extend, all of this generation bullshit isn't really that damned important. People are people, and while analyzing cohorts isn't an entirely worthless concept, it needs to be kept in its place..

Acetone isn't really *that* nasty. It certainly beats acids, or substances that create strongly poisonous fumes. You'd have to try hard to get anything more serious than a migraine from acetone fumes poisoning, and while it's certainly not good for your skin, washing your hands after finishing the work is good enough - no need to panic if a drop lands on your skin. Sure you should keep the container tightly closed and you need to watch out with fire, but it's really hardly worse than gasoline when you work with it.

Yes, the difference between size of detail you want to retain and size of the 'ribbing' you want to smooth out should be large - if you want to smooth a tiny figurine that won't be too helpful. If the object is a cast for a large silicone piece though, the loss of detail will be insignificant. (and if it's gravity that smooths it out, you're already too far and destroying the piece. It's surface tension that should do the work.)

There is a point when vaccines kill more than the diseases they prevent.

Say, there's a 1:10,000 chance you die from vaccine against disease X, and 1:20,000 chance you contract and die from disease X.

The pleb reaction is an outcry "BAN THE VACCINE".

What they fail to realize is that the chance of death from disease X is so low is only thanks to the prevalence of the vaccine. The disease can't spread, and the chance of contracting it or medication failing is minimal because great most of the population is immune - the disease can't find many viable hosts.

Shortly after you ban the vaccine, number of deaths from disease X will spike, far overshadowing the number of deaths from the vaccine. It won't be 1 in 20,000 or 10,000 but 1 in 100 or so! But that's something ignorant people don't realize. They pick up the numbers "as of now" and claim the medicine is worse than whatever it cures.

I wonder if money would talk. Unvaccinated people simply taxed for extra health insurance for those whom they endanger.