OpenTangent

Apparently my vehement atheism is becoming a real embarrassment for my family. I was advised (in a very caring and helpful yet condescending manner, as is Christian custom) that my sarcastic attitude towards the fairy tales that so many people hold so close, is putting a lot of social strain on those around me. It was suggested that i unfriend anyone on Facebook who may be embarrassed by me directly or anyone who may be embarrassed on behalf of those close to me.

The lower receiver is the part of a gun that actually makes it a gun, at least in the eyes of the law. It's this part that handles the ammunition intake and the trigger system and it's this part that requires a gun license to own. Apparently every other part can be bought separately by anyone without any restriction or regulation.

The word "utopia" implies a perfect society which is an oxymoron in itself because a society that stagnates is far from perfect. Like anything living; society needs to grow and adapt. The word communism also strikes fear into uninformed minds but in reality it's the sustainable approach when compared to free market capitalism or what we live in today which is creditism or wage slavery.

Facebook recently censored an image entitled "Ema" by Gerhard Richter because it contained nudity. I'm curious to find out what might happen to an image of L'Origine du monde by Gustave Courbet.

Of all the champions of the Freedom of Information movement none can claim to have held the banner quite as high as The Pirate Bay . They have weathered legal storms far greater than anything Napster or even  Wikileaks have conjured up yet as i write this The Pirate Bay site is down. In an orchestrated attack , ISPs accross Europe were raided by police. A number of news sites reported that the site was up and running soon after the raids but this does not seem to be the case anymore. It seems like this was a solid effort to put them down for good but i'm sure this is not the last we'll see of The Pirate Bay. Edit: Guess who's back up ;)

I am constantly questioning what it means to be ethical and although it is definitely a complicated matter I've always felt it's best to hold onto some pillar of certainty. For me that pillar is honesty, if you're faced with a difficult moral dilemma it's best to choose honesty. That of course is also not always a black and white situation, in which case i turn to a lesson i was taught as a child; not telling someone something you know they would want to hear is also lying. Hence, i can say with a good degree of certainty that censorship is unethical. The Islamic search engine I'mHalal has a haram system which warns about or outright denies certain search terms depending on their haram level. If a person is not already willing to avoid certain things before arriving at the search engine then the objective has already failed, and if an individual is not aware of why certain things are classified as haram then rightly, they cannot be expected to avoid them. Goog...